The night deepens, and stars spring out of hiding. They made the music in my head change a little. “So why am I alive?”

  He only shakes his head.

  “You’re supposed to kill me, right? Charlene tried to kill me.”

  “I’m tired of killing. You were the only one left besides some of the boys, and Alexis and Seeger were finishing them off. I knew they wouldn’t listen. I thought, if the music could control you, it might be worth it to save one. To study you instead of dissecting you. But mostly—I’m so tired of killing things. Small things. Big things. So full of blood.”

  I’ve never heard him string so many words together, and now, I hear the accent: something a little off about the vowels and the ends of words. He’s older than I thought.

  I hold my breath as a spot of light in the distance splits into two headlights coming closer. Out here, you can see for infinity, so it takes a long time for the car to pass us. It never stops growing bigger and brighter. I wait for it to pull across the freeway and wonder what Denton would do. So close, the lamps like mute stars burning through raw optic nerves, so I shut my eyes tight as they zoom by. I expect them to explode into Chevron blue and red, the siren to scream through my music, but nothing happens. Denton lets out a long breath.

  “Are the police looking for us?”

  “Police? No. By now the compound’s sanitized. Nothing’s left but us, and they won’t want anyone to find us. They’ll take care of it themselves.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Black ops? Secret government? CIA? Illuminati?” I’m not going to ask about the summer job—the study on the effects of a low-strength magnetic field on memory, two thousand and room and board for three weeks, and we could call it an internship—because that was a lie so magnificent it’s gone past outrage, past even complaining about.

  “ ‘Black ops?’ Jesus.” He laughs. It’s a surprisingly nice laugh and stops too quickly.

  So that’s when he tells me about Earth swallowing up another planet and how now it’s been pushing its way out of the core. Forcing up to the surface, pushing sulfur in front of it.

  “That’s why we’re in Toyah and excavating in Sulfur Springs. There’s a site in Australia, too. It’s like the sulfur deposit’s a scab and this . . . substance, this something swallowed three or four or even, hell, five billion years ago is the matter that’s behind it. The matter in Australia and the matter in Texas have the same chemical signature. Which means it might be part of the same mass and immense. And moving. Hatching out of the planet. And who knows how long that’s been happening. Nobody would’ve noticed except for the animals.”

  “Animals?”

  “Rancher out past Toyah liked to shoot jackrabbits in the afternoon. Only lately, the jackrabbits wouldn’t be shot. They knew where the bullet was coming from and moved aside. Or if they were hit, it didn’t affect them much.”

  I think about it. “Obviously, he missed the shot. Was he drunk?”

  “He was drunk a lot at the end. But he said he didn’t miss. He was accustomed to shooting three, four of those jacks most evenings. Used a big enough gauge so they explode, just a quick red spray and they’re gone. Bang two, three, just like that. And then there was the damage to the cattle. He’d find them out there exsanguinated. Totally bloodless. And burrowed through—actually tunneled. More and more reports like that, where the sulfur deposits are. Too similar for coincidence.”

  “I didn’t see any cattle where we were.”

  “No. All gone.”

  “Sanitized?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  It’s afternoon by the time we reach the enclave, red dust in the air making the sun swollen and crimson. It squats in the west like a wound in the sky, the thick air trembling around it. I shield my eyes and stare at it, Lonestar humming in my ears, sore from the earbuds. I don’t know how far south we are, but it can’t be far from the border. Denton turns off the main road and bumps over gravel and fine dust for five or six miles before we come to a fence, thick timbers and barb wire, that stretches far as I can see. A gate blocks the dirt road, and three figures stand waiting for us. How Denton told them we were coming I don’t know. He parks and motions for me to get out.

  “Leave the gun,” he says.

  I secure the earbuds before I move. “The battery is not going to last much longer,” I tell him.

  He bites his lip. “We’ll find a way to charge it.”

  Two men and a woman stand at the gate. The woman’s sun-bleached hair is French-braided back, leaving her tanned face exposed to the bullet-hole sun. Probably in her thirties, in jeans and a pink, button-down shirt that might be left over from a corporate life. She holds a shotgun cradled casually across her elbows, finger very close to the trigger. The younger man has that white towhead hair that kids usually grow out of and a smooth face with bright red patches on both cheeks. He wears a short-sleeved tee with a stylized red, white, and blue squiggle across it, and the skin of his arms is as red as his cheeks. At his crotch, in front of a huge oval brass buckle, he holds a Glock or Colt or something. He stares past Denton at me, beady blue eyes narrowing.

  The other, older man is clearly in charge. He has no weapon, only the utter confidence of place, of rootedness. He has a face the woman will have in another decade; the sun’s baked deep wrinkles across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes, the sides of his mouth. He has a Caterpillar tractor cap, dusty green with close-trimmed hair beneath. Probably his forehead is fishbelly-white under the hat.

  Caterpillar cap pushes the gate open with booted foot. Denton walks inside, and I follow.

  “No one wants you here,” he begins without preamble, not caring that I can hear. “They say this Chink girl and you are moles, and it’s too near these troop deployments for comfort.”

  “You’re in charge here,” says Denton. “What do you think?”

  “Me? I know you’re a crappy spy and got as much to do with Jade Helm as Walmart. But I don’t want you here either.”

  “They experimented on her. They’re going to kill her. Killed a lot of kids this summer.”

  “And you helped.”

  Denton shrugs.

  “She’s not one of ours,” says the younger man. “Why would we want one of your monsters?”

  “Shut up, Billy,” says the woman. He looks at her and scowls, but he does shut up.

  Denton kicks at the dry ground, raising a tiny dust cloud. We watch it drift away.

  “You owe me.”

  The older man barks once, loud, just like a big dog. I’m startled until I realize he’s laughing.

  “I know, I know,” says Denton. “Still.”

  “You’re calling that catastrophe in? For this?” He flicks his thumb at me. Denton nods, the barest movement of his head.

  “Gods. ‘You owe me,’ like a bad movie. I should have Billy run you out right now, ’cept you’d probably kill him.”

  Billy shifts forward, hand tightening on his gun. Denton gives him a considering look. “Maybe. She definitely will.”

  The boy’s blue stare is chilly in the hot sun.

  They take us to some cabins higher up where the foothills started. Mine has six bunks installed along one wall. No one else is here. There’s electricity; Denton has a charger stowed in the backpack, and I sit cross-legged on the floor, connected by earbuds to iPhone to circuit to whatever means they have of powering this place.

  In the twilight, Denton builds a fire inside a ring of smooth rocks. The dried brush he uses smells medicinal, and the flame is pale. We sit on a plastic tarp, and he lays out a towel. A scalpel and a bigger knife, the blade made for hunting or skinning maybe. Neat squares of gauze. A bottle of peroxide. I wait until he’s finished before I take out the right earbud. The thump and purr of “Walking in Memphis” continues in my left ear.

  “The animals,” he says. “Groundhogs that couldn’t be shot, carnivorous rabbits, coyotes that can outpace a Hummer. Those we could bring down had this ancient matter, this planetary substance, crystallized in their bones. Swimming in their blood. It made them stronger, faster. Almost indestructible.”

  “Killers.”

  “That too. When you find that contamination by some substance doesn’t result in sickness or deformation but enhances the subject, makes it stronger . . . ”

  “You experiment.”

  He pokes at the scalpel. Folding his hands in his lap, he looks at me directly. It’s the closest to an apology I’m going to get.”

  “You’ve got implants—more like seeds, really, charged with the matter and inserted along your spine.”

  “When did they do that?”

  “Remember the shots? Flu shot, MMR?”

  “Yes, but . . . ”

  “You fainted.”

  “How did you . . . ”

  “You all fainted. But not really.”

  I look at the fire while he lets me think about it.

  “People get embarrassed about fainting. Maybe not all the girls, but the guys are. With luck, some of you didn’t even remember. That’s when. And along the spine—you might be a little sore, but you might notice a funny lump in your forearm. Same principle with the animals, the chimps. They couldn’t chew them out.”

  He holds up two fingers close together. “Same idea as radiation treatments through implants or a stick of Depo-Provera in your arm. Slow, constant dosage.”

  “The music,” I say quickly before he can go on. “Why does the music keep me myself?”

  “I don’t know. It worked with the chimps. It was a guess. Maybe . . . ” Another of his shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  He picks up the scalpel and has me hunch a bit, so the implants pop up against the skin. It doesn’t even hurt when he cuts them out. I can feel the blade slice, feel him dig around in my meat for the tiny plastic sliver. A thing like pain but not. The void in my brain takes it and makes it something else, weaves it into its own music. That’s when I know it’s not going to work. It’s already deep in my system, my bones. My stars. But you have to try anyway sometimes.

  The sad trickle of sound though the headphones isn’t suppressing anything, only distracting it for a time. Something that sang to itself in its place beyond the edge of the galaxy before it orbited inward, caught by the gravity of the forming planets. I’ve heard recordings of the sound space makes, of Jupiter moaning in the void.

  Denton deposits three tiny grey slivers into my palm. I throw them far out into the gathering dark.

  Probably, they buried GPS in me, and Denton didn’t know. Or the Jeep had a tracker. Or they just knew where he’d take me. They hit us at dawn, fast and lean, and don’t bother with prisoners. I make it out of my bunk and out of the cabin in time to see a small figure in the distance, Billy probably, run away from a small green figure. Small green aims something, and the runner’s head starbursts red, though his legs keep pumping for a few seconds. More green figures swarm across the red dirt like ants.

  Denton’s sprawled at my feet outside the cabin door, face down. He doesn’t move.

  Small popping sounds bounce ’round my free ear. My thigh feels hot, and I look down. My flesh is cratered open, dark and wet. It reminds me of Charlene’s belly, and I have a brief desire to plunge my hands in. I feel heat. No pain.

  Another legshot to the opposite knee, and I go down. They must be trying to take me alive. Idiots. My head slams into the rocky ground, and the music stops for a fraction of a second. In that instant, day becomes star-bordered night. Then, the sharp notes of the violin, and back to day and light and burning.

  I crawl across the ground, a thin trickle of music still pouring through the broken earbud in my left ear. There’s something soft, still warm in front of me. Half-blind, I reach for it and pull. It flops over like a badly packed duffle. Wet all over my hands, and Denton’s sightless eyes looking up at the sky.

  Something seizes my hair and wrenches my head back. One of the green men. He goes on one knee beside me, keeping a hold on my hair. The earbud falls, the tinny sound of the violin gone. I blink, look at his eyes. Hazel. Expressionless. Blink, look at Denton’s body. Blink, look straight at the sun. There is no music; the music is gone.

  And then, all the music in the world.

  He holds my hair so tight it starts to rip out of my head. A knee presses into my back, bending me double. I don’t care. I’m looking at the sun, and it is a red bloody hole in the sky. It always was. They’re crawling out of it now, all my brothers, all my beautiful sisters in their glory.

  The moon is a dead rock in the sky. All its songs are lies. Let those who love her perish on her unfeeling breast. But the sun is a sphere of boiling larvae, and they sing. My face bursts open, a ruin. Renewed, my true face emerges, and I turn it to the green man. His eyes go wide and glassy as my tendrils reach for him and burrow into his skin. I will find the music inside him, the fragment of the sun he hides inside, and liberate it, a small brother-larvae that longs to join the rest of them boiling in the star overhead.

  I will free all of them, and we will sing, soaring higher and higher, chirrup, whistle, slur, shake. Larks.

  Originally published in Tomorrow’s Cthulhu,

  edited by Scott Gable & C. Dombrowski.

  Samantha Henderson’s short fiction and poetry have been published in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, The Lovecraft eZine, Goblin Fruit, Bourbon Penn, and Weird Tales, reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nebula Awards Showcase, Steampunk Revolutions and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and is upcoming in The Year’s Best Science Fiction 34. She’s the author of the Forgotten Realms novels Heaven’s Bones and Dawnbringer.

  Queen Midnight

  by Eliza Victoria

  “They say its eyelids have gone down another meter,” Abi said, her voice echoing in the stairwell. “It’s just a matter of time. Maybe in three years, it’ll finally close its eyes and stop giving us nightmares.”

  “Are you looking at Bakunawatch again?” Mimi asked, the balloon squeaking in her hands. Abi raised her cell phone. The screen showed the monster’s face, eyes like a pair of bloody tumors protruding above sharp, pointed teeth the size of skyscrapers.

  Paula frowned at them both. “What a stupid name,” she said. “It doesn’t even look like a sea serpent.” Scientists had likened it to the giant Grenadier fish, a deep-sea fish with large mouth and eyes, except that this one was truly gigantic, with the tip of its head resting on what used to be Alesund in Norway and its tail brushing what used to be Krasnoyarsk in Russia, a body length of more than four thousand kilometers. Some fiction writer, in an attempt to reference local mythology, called the creature “Bakunawa” on social media. Her post was shared more than eighty thousand times, and now the name still stuck, five years after the Surfacing. She also coined the term “Surfacing”, to describe the day the creature began to appear from the depths of the ocean. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do, Paula thought. Some turn to naming the unnamable; others join a sad, undermanned, underfunded, wish-granting nonprofit organization, pretending the world is still sane.

  They were sitting on the stairs of the apartment building where the Child of the Month lived. It used to be an affluent building, but after the Surfacing it had fallen into disrepair, like most other places. The stairwell was dark, made darker by the gray clouds outside, threatening rain. The elevators and corridors smelled like dog pee, and Paula had earlier stepped on what could either be wet mud or feces.

  The balloon in Mimi’s hands exploded, the sound as surprising and deafening as a blast. “Jesus!” Paula said.

  “Sorry,” Mimi said, looking distraught.

  “Maybe we should give up on the balloons,” Abi said. “We’re not making any headway, and we only have thirty minutes left.”

  “The boy asked for balloons,” Paula said, reaching into the box next to her for the hand balloon pump. “Let’s give it fifteen more minutes.”

  Abi sighed. “I’ll go fix Mimi’s eye makeup.”

  They managed to make four balloons—one shaped like a poodle, one shaped like a cat, one shaped like a monkey, and one shaped like a sort-of horse with one ear and three legs. “It’s the effort that counts,” Abi said, indignant, when Paula stared at it five seconds too long.

  “Not really, Abi,” Paula said. “But sure, whatever you say.”

  “I play better than I make balloons.”

  “And thank God for that.”

  They didn’t want to smell like the elevators, so they took the stairs. The apartment was only two flights up.

  “If the mother requested for media coverage,” Mimi said, “do you think HQ would have given us a PA?”

  “Do you need a hand with your case?” Paula asked.

  “No,” Mimi said. “Just wondering out loud if the organization still has integrity.”

  The floor where the boy’s apartment unit was located looked and felt abandoned. Every door they passed was locked, with poorly spelled signs announcing that the previous residents had moved out, and to contact the building supervisor for rent inquiries or to get the forwarding details. There were boxes on the corridors filled with toys, bedsheets, clothes, books, bric-a-brac, all covered with a thick film of dust. Abi peeked into one box and found kitchen appliances: a toaster, a microwave, a blender. Mimi found a laptop under several pillows.

  “Do you think this still works?” she asked.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Paula said.

  Abi stood next to Mimi and pinched one of the pillows with her thumb and forefinger. “This is goose down!” she exclaimed.

  “What did I say about not touching anything?”

  “I’m coming back for those pillows,” Abi said.

  Paula knocked on the door and readied her smile. The door was answered by a woman with smeared lipstick and a large gold-orange stain on her white blouse. “Good morning,” the woman said. Paula’s smile faltered a little.

  “Mrs. De Vera?”

  “That’s me,” Mrs. De Vera said. “Well.” She stood in the doorway and stared at them for an awkward minute. “I didn’t expect to see a group of young ladies. I thought only old biddies volunteer for this kind of thing.”

 

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