You jump out of the cushions and run to me while I stand frozen. Casey is a half step behind you, the book thudding unheeded to the carpet. You stop three feet away.
She flings herself into my arms.
Whatever we say, it’s meaningless. Just to hear the sound of each other’s voices. I crouch and she squeezes me breathless and we’re both crying, and you’re just looking at me, at the woman, at me.
I meet your gaze over Casey’s head, her sweet scent lifting me like helium. I want to hug you, squeeze you tight. I know . . . this is going to be more complicated.
I can’t blame you. It’s been almost a year. You’re no Penelope, and how could you have been sure that I was ever coming home? And these things are hard to do alone.
I can’t blame you. But I still do.
The woman says nothing. She comes to stand behind you and places a hesitant hand on your elbow. You let it remain.
“I brought a burro,” I tell Casey, long before I can bear to let her go. “Her name is Asset. You should run out and meet her.”
The door bangs behind her. I guess a burro is as good as a pony after all.
“Alyce,” you say.
You are weeping, those silent pearl-like tears that never robbed you of dignity. I, by contrast, am red-eyed and dripping.
“This is Claire,” you say, turning so you bridge the gap between us. “She’s from Hawaii. She was stranded.”
“I’m not angry,” I say. “But it’s our house and our daughter.”
“Stay,” you say.
I look at Claire. She’s tall, good shoulders, laugh lines in olive skin. She nods.
It’s a different world, isn’t it? I don’t know her yet. I can’t judge.
I think of the stolen food and water that got me here. I think of hiding in the desert from those men.
You’ve never seen everything. Maybe I’ll like her if I give her half a chance. Casey does.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it go.
“Fine, but I’m taking our bed.”
“I’ll change the sheets,” says Claire.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award-winning author of almost a hundred short stories and more than twenty-five novels, the most recent of which is Steles of the Sky, from Tor Books. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.
BRING THEM DOWN
Ben H. Winters
BRING HER TO ME, says the voice. BRING HER TO ME.
God’s voice is an alarm bell in the night. God’s voice is a rattle of bones in a box. God’s voice is a grinding rusted growl.
Robert clutches his forehead and grits his teeth and God says it again: BRING HER TO ME.
And then silence.
Robert releases himself and exhales and keeps walking. He is trailing his friend Pea by a couple of paces, as he has been for most of the time they’ve been walking, all these hours of fitful giddy wandering. Following their feet, going this way and then that, under the vast star-littered late-night sky, through winding and crooked alleyways, up half-paved streets, along the empty sidewalks and the broad avenues of the little city.
It was very late and then it was very early, and now at last it is becoming day. Pale yellow light seeps between the buildings. Pea turns and gives him a tired, bleary smile, and Robert finds a way to smile back.
Through all of these hours, Robert has had it, over and over, the voice in his head—now soft, now loud, now an imploring whisper, now an accusatory shriek. God’s voice on occasion grants him an interregnum of silence: a minute . . . ten minutes . . . and then comes roaring back, louder and more insistent on each return:
BRING HER TO ME.
BRING HER TO ME.
BRING HER NOW.
There is no ambiguity. No confusion. What God wants is for Robert to kill Pea. God wants her to go through, like everyone else has, by now, gone through.
BRING HER TO ME, says God. BRING HER NOW.
Robert screws his eyes shut as tightly as he can and then releases them slowly. He will not do it; he will not obey; and he cannot allow Pea to see what is happening. He will not. He steps up beside her, gestures for her to wait a moment, and goes first, emerging now from the alley into one of the wide streets.
Apartment buildings tower on either side: Building 16 and Building 17. Robert and Pea stare up at them with astonishment. There are no lights turning on inside the buildings, no day beginning. No morning bustle evident in silhouette through the shades, breakfasts being made, clothes selected.
Pea turns to him suddenly. Her palm is clapped over her mouth, and she is blinking her big black eyes rapidly—blinking back tears? No; she is thinking. Considering something. He can see it buzzing in her eyes, busy movement, rapid thoughts. (She’s so pretty. The thought stabs Robert, freezes him in place. She’s so pretty!)
“I think . . .” she trails off, bites her lower lip. “I was thinking, I would like to go back and see my parents.”
“Your parents?” says Robert. God’s voice, a bullhorn blare, BRING HER TO ME. He ignores it, fights against it. Talks softly to Pea. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
Pea nods forcefully, her brow furrowed and her mouth set and solemn. She’s got her thick black hair tied back in a ponytail. He thinks again—as he’s been thinking since he barged into her bedroom last night, with his crazy idea—thinks how lucky he is to be with her. Just the two of them in the whole world. He’s so lucky. She’s already on the way, walking quickly down the street toward Building 49. Robert rushes to keep up, tripping a little on the stump of a broken hydrant.
Everything went just as Robert had hoped. He had convinced himself over a period of months to defy God’s instructions, and then last night he convinced Pea to defy them, too. And it looks like everyone else in the city—which means everyone else in the world—accepted what God has been whispering or shouting the last 17 years: that this world had fallen into sin and had to be rebuilt. Everyone else followed God’s dictums to the letter: bought the meat and poisoned the meat and ate the meat and died.
But not Robert and his new friend Pea, not lucky Robert and the sweet girl he’s always watched and loved from afar. Now it’s him and Pea stumbling, weary but glad, through the dead quiet streets of the city, washed in morning sunlight.
He’d imagined it happening just this way. He’d dreamed of this scene.
Except—except—
BRING HER TO ME. Like the pounding of a fist on a length of pipe.
BEAR HER AWAY. Like bullets being fired into a wall.
Stop it, hisses Robert into the chamber of his own mind, Stop it, please!—and then after the briefest of silences, after no silence at all this time, God does answer—tauntingly, smirkingly, like a peacock flaunting his omniscience, God answers—
I WILL NOT STOP.
I WILL NOT STOP UNTIL YOU BRING HER TO ME.
The voice is with him, dogging his steps like a wolf following the track, sometimes hidden but never gone. Pea turns down into the fourth circle; they’re almost there.
BRING HER TO ME.
I will not.
IT IS WHY I LET YOU LIVE.
I decided to live.