He saw Karolin and Danny when he was still out of earshot. They were hanging around the front arch, smoking through their masks and avoiding eye contact.
“It kind of sucks in there,” he said by way of greeting as he reached them. “Why don’t we just go out to the woods?”
Kay’s mask distorted as she rolled her eyes beneath it, briefly giving her the appearance of a blanked-out zombie-wolfgirl. The plastic teeth already looked more like bone. It wasn’t even the one he’d given her. “Jeddy, there are bugs in the woods,” she said, barely patient with his foolishness. “And Tynesha brought those rum balls. And it’s almost time anyway. We’d never make it out there. Your birdy girlfriend can wait, just come inside.”
“Actually it’s a juvenile male,” he heard himself saying, and wished he wasn’t. “Looking for a mate by showing off his repertoire.”
“You always want to go,” Kay told him, stubbing out her smoke and yanking open the Wildhaus door. “You always want to be somewhere else.”
“It’s not my fault most places suck,” he said to the door as it swung shut with awkward slowness.
“Maybe it is.” Danny sounded serious, but he smiled. “If you’re the common denominator.” He leaned on the wall and lit a second brown cigarette from the first. “You notice she said that while leaving.”
“I like that she’s not fake,” Jedward said, because it was what he always said in his mind when practicing for this inevitable conversation. “She says whatever she’s thinking and does whatever she feels like.”
“Yeah, you know who does that? Assholes.” Danny’s anger, always flittering around his head, dive-bombed into the discussion again. “You just like it because you’re all scrunched up on yourself. You go around like nothing means anything, like you’ll wake up any time now. And it makes everythink you think you’re better than them.”
Danny loomed up so close suddenly that Jedward was sure he was finally mad enough to actually hit him, and then for a second it seemed like maybe he was going to do something even weirder, but instead he fell back and sulked on the wall again. Nothing, Jedward realized. He just felt nothing at all.
“Something’s going to happen, Danford,” was what his mouth said this time. “You have to come and see.”
The woods were cool and the color of glowing scallions. Fresh green leaves filtered the moonlight into tinted planes and striated beams, so every gap in the canopy became a projector and every flat surface an empty movie screen. Back at Wildhaus, the plastic wolf-people were probably gathering under the big skylight, waiting for the peak, the final hit that would take them over the edge. Into nowhere. Nothing. Another party. Another night nowould remember, except who had the Herks to make it in. One plus up got you an hour. Everykept running in the same direction and noever moved.
Not tonight. They could hear it coming from two miles off—a rumble, a rustle that gained bass until it became a steady throb. Danny grabbed his hand and stood too close, and Jedward could see the silvery-blue ripples starting to pulse and shine along the seams of his mask—where they would be, anyhow, if he weren’t fully soaked now. Along the edges and between the lines, and the light was entirely unnatural, especially here, and then the wolf face stared back at him without Danny inside it.
But Jedward knew he was there, cheery and managerial, pulling the mental levers from inside. The paw on his arm felt warm again, articulated and alive, and the claws were real enough to lightly tear his shirt where they touched it. The legs were basically the same, though bright red fur now ran down Danny’s chest and belly and thighs. It wasn’t quite thick enough to hide his genitals when he was standing, so with a very unwolflike gesture he plucked a few leaves and soft green stems from the bushes around them and wrapped them around his waist. They’d have loincloths on in Wildhaus, though some of them not for very long.
Jedward offered his arm again once his friend was covered, then on an impulse threw the arm up around Danny’s fuzzy shoulders, feeling the new muscles tensing. Standing side by side, facing the road, they listened.
The rumble died away into a heavy quietness. Then a howl rang out, far off, and another answered it. Shrieks followed, coming closer as the Wildhaus partiers fled stupidly towards the woods, because that was what they always did before if the cops crashed in. Faster and stronger now, they reached the edge of the trees in just a few minutes, and Jedward hugged Danny closer as they heard crashing and stumbling all around them. Then another howl, this one taken up almost instantly by a pack that was clearly now unified and on the move. Jedward had sold two or three of his new masks to some of the stragglers, to hand out to their friends, so he figured the real wolves would well outnumber the plastic ones, since there were always more people outside than in.
Finally they saw one, and Jedward felt floaty with pride. It was beautiful, seamless and soft, flowing as it ran like a soft bead of black mercury with fur and white jaws. Nearby they heard plastic wolf-people trying to force unfamiliar, stiffened limbs to climb trees, and another shriek as someone fell from one. The black wolf that had just run by them pounced, but the Herks were thick and tough especially now, and its jaws could only pull away long gooey strands of furry morphic rubber, many of which snapped back onto the owner in warped crisscrosses and ugly lumps.
Danny, watching this, made the noise which Jedward recognized as a human laugh coming out of a mask-warped mouth. “Right,” he said, muffled but clear enough, uncannily. He sounded relieved, as if he’d been a little worried his friend might have finally snapped. “Okay, it’s funny. But these are good, really good. You can’t even see that they’re masks.”
“That’s because they aren’t anymore,” Jedward said, tightening his arm on Danny’s shoulders in his excitement. “The masks are gone once triggered. One-use.”
Danny’s mask stared at him as the futile chaos of growls and shrieks and scampering around them in the dark woods continued. “Do you realize,” he said finally, “how stupid rich we’re going to be?”
“No.” Jedward didn’t mind; he knew this was how it would go. He’d been there too at first. Danny would come around, though. He would get it, and maybe Kay would too. Once she tried one, and maybe went on a run with him. Then she’d understand that he didn’t think he was better than anybody. He just wanted things to be fair.
“No? Why? You … we made it, right?”
“Yeah,” Jedward said. “But it’s really one-use. One time. After that, it just happens on its own. Every full moon. For anythat wants to.”
Two more wolves ran by them, heads up with pleasure at the chase. They ignored Danny, who was funny and always remembered names. The masked who’d managed to get into trees were clinging and whimpering above, and Jedward knew some of them would wait there until morning rather than risk ruining their genuine Herks, not yet understanding that they were worthless now.
“I don’t know, buddy, if you want us to make a living you might want to change the formula,” Danny said slowly, doing math in his head and finding the brick wall at the end of the figures. “I don’t think it’ll work.”
Jedward took a flashlight and a rope ladder from his bag and began sweeping it through the trees, looking for Karolin’s beads shining in the white beam. She might be really scared, and if he helped her down, she might be really pleased.
“It’s already working,” he said.
THIRST
by Vandana Singh
In the dream there were snakes coiling about her, dark and glossy as the hairs on her head, and an altar, and the smell of sandalwood incense, her mother’s favorite kind. When her eyes opened she could not remember for a moment who she was. Even the familiar room, with the whitewash peeling off the walls and summer dust on the sill of the open window, the sag of the bed, the curve of the man’s shoulders as he lay in sleep with his back to her—all that seemed imbued with remoteness, as though it had nothing whatever to do with her. Slowly her name came to her: Susheela, and with it the full weight of her misery returned. Her husband stirred in sleep, but he did not turn towards her.