IGMS Issue 48 Read online

  "His eyes are open," said Cal.

  "Welcome back, Father," said March.

  "The others?" asked Sunk.

  "You are the last to awaken," said Cal.

  "They're still weak, but all are a live," said March. "The plague is released when the gestational sac is broken, and we think that the disease matured inside Darling's eggshell and emerged in a much milder form than the virus from a sac that's broken immediately upon expulsion from the uterus."

  "So it causes less harm," said Cal. "But it still may confer all the immunities. When our babies go full term in the womb and the pouch, then humans are not much harmed by the disease, and are powerfully blessed by it."

  Cal and March assured their parents that they had already passed all their memories of Darling's successful incubation to their faraway twins. No one had really understood that the sac was an egg, and Cal and March had only guessed it because all the earlier babies had died. Now they would all have a good chance of survival.

  March and Cal had been far from Oldest, but Darling was now the eldest of her generation to survive.

  Audny soon discovered that the new genome, with the extra pairs of chromosomes, held true in the baby's ova. This new egg-birthing primate species was the end product of this round of genetic change, with March's and Cal's genome being only the intermediate stage.

  "Now we'll find out what it was like for you," said March to Audny. "Raising babies that are much smarter than we are."

  "You will not find out," said Audny.

  March smiled. "We never raised normal human babies, or saw them raised," she said. "So we can't compare."

  "We had hundreds of generations of experience and lore to rely on," said Audny, "and suddenly it didn't help us at all. You have no such support. You have to invent it all. And why should Darling be all that different from you?"

  Given how troublesome it was to get Darling not to climb on everything that held still, they all agreed that it was a mercy that the levitation and flying didn't begin until she was nearly five.

  "We intermediates," said Cal to March one day. "A single generation, before the kinetics. We'll leave no trace in the archeological record."

  "We're inheriting a culture that writes and reads obsessively," said March. "We won't be forgotten."

  "Why do I feel so real?" asked Cal. "If we're meant only to be a temporary measure, like the lock of a canal, to raise the barge of humanity up one level, and then be left behind --"

  "Life is life," said March. "Our children will live on after us, and theirs after them. Each generation's life is different from those before and after, and each is real and good."

  "But when we die, our kind is gone."

  "That has always been true, generation after generation," Sunk told them wearily. "You make the best of your little life, while you have it. Then everybody leaves you behind. Nothing in the alien genome changed that."

  But it did change it. Death was postponed for each of them almost a thousand years, like Methuselah. Each of them lived to see at least ten generations born. Cal and March lived to see the last of the original humans die: Nels and Beleza's generation. And Darling and her siblings lived to bury their parents.

  "Why do we bury them?" Darling's seventh-great grandson asked her.

  "It shows respect and honor, in a manner that their generation would have understood," Darling replied.

  "But all the humans are gone now," said the boy.

  "We still speak their languages," said Darling. "We still wear their clothing and live in their houses. Their culture lives on in us."

  "Tell me stories of the humans, Grandma Darling," said the boy. "You're the last who remembers them."

  "And you're the last who cares," she said.

  "Oh, no I'm not," said the boy. "I'll remember all your stories and tell the little ones."

  "That is a good use of some of the thousand years of your life," said Darling. "But for now, my dear, fly home."

  Like a Thief in the Light

  by Alethea Kontis

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  The Stoners were up to their old tricks again.

  Sun downshifted the street sweeper and pulled up on the brake. He untangled his gangly limbs from the gears and stepped down, cracking his head on the doorway again. Stupid low ceiling. Stupid giant head.

  Pierre never had this problem; his head just dented the doorway. But Sun was not a gargoyle, so there would be a tiara of bruises around his bulbous, bald pate until he remembered how to get out of his own way. Nor did Sun have Pierre's water-summoning power, so he had to fill the sweeper's giant tanks in the Shadow Street Reservoir before making rounds on the days when Pierre was too weary to sweep. Those days were every day now.

  The Stoners weren't gargoyles either, just a gang of grotesques who liked to perpetuate the lie because gargoyles had a far more romantic reputation. But their bodies were also made of stone, and they also froze into statues in the daylight-as the asshole currently blocking his sweeper demonstrated-but they had no magic over water or anything else. The only talent the Stoners had was "taking donations" from passers by. It wasn't technically stealing if the person gave them all their worldly goods out of the kindness of their own heart...or from the fear of having said heart ripped out through their chest cavity by stone claws.

  Sun paused before stepping all the way down to the street and leaned back into the cab. He was careful not to wake Fuzz, curled up and dozing in the passenger's seat like a long tailed black rat who wore his skull on the outside. The aye-aye was nocturnal, like ninety-nine percent of the population of Shadow Street. But Fuzz insisted on tagging along, and Sun's life was easier if he didn't argue.

  Sun's long white fingers silently flicked the button on the glove box and he took out the can of safety orange spray paint Pierre saved to mark road hazards for the night shift. Fuzz let out a soft whuffle of a snore. The can smelled like gasoline. There wasn't much on that ancient wreck of a sweeper that didn't smell like gasoline. Pierre had managed to keep the sweeper running, but one good rain would wash it into the shadows, sprockets and widgets and all.

  Shaking the can was like parading a brass band down the street. The ball bearings careening back and forth echoed off the walls of the buildings on the empty street loud enough to wake the dead . . . somewhere else. No dead here worth his salt would bother to rise before twilight. Nothing walked this street at noon except the loners, the shadows, and the street sweepers. Sun was all three.

  The harsh light of day was unforgiving to the bricks and mortar of Shadow Street. There were no streetlights and gas lamps to take the years away, no neon to gussy up the cracks and scars. Daylight made all the buildings equal: from the gothic marble and limestone library to the concrete and glass of that new vampire club. At the Witching Hour club, blood was love and sex and life. At noon, it was just another brown stain on the pavement.

  Everything was tall and gray and unsightly in the brightness, just like him. It was the only place and time Sun ever felt like he belonged, the king of the world, quiet and looming in the ugly truth.

  Sun stopped shaking the can, and the high-pitched gunfire sound stopped repeating off the sun-bleached moldy walls. Hatch looked a little worse for the wear himself, now that Sun was brave enough to get a close look at him. After sunset he wouldn't want to be closer than a block away from any of the Stoners, but here and now he could examine to his heart's content.

  Hatch was covered in pockmarks, small divots in the rock made from time, wear, and general stupidity. One of his horns was missing the tip, giving him a lopsided look. Hatch was a wingless grotesque, with a face like a bull and the body of a lion. His feet were splayed and his arms were spread wide-he'd tried to make as large a barrier of himself as possible, and he'd succeeded. Sun would have to back the sweeper up and swing it wide to miss him, after he cleaned this section of the street by hand. Sun wished he could back up and run Hatch over with the sweeper itself, but he knew it w
ould 1.) irreparably damage the sweeper and 2.) wake Fuzz up. Sun was far more scared of the latter.

  Sun wrapped his long fingers around the ring in Hatch's nose and rapped against his bull chin. "Anybody home?" Sun giggled to himself, then quit when he realized how pathetic it sounded. He cleared his throat and started again.

  "Looking rough, man. Know what you need? A makeover. Here, let me help you." Sun shook the can a few more times for good measure, then painted Hatch a nice, full head of safety orange hair.

  "Remember, ladies. Do not neglect those eyebrows." Sun took it upon himself to attend to them on Hatch's behalf. "I do declare. You look at least two hundred years younger." Sun kissed Hatch on the cheek and stepped back to survey his handiwork.

  That's when he noticed the shadow.

  Everyone knows: the brighter the sunlight, the darker the shadow. What everyone doesn't know is what hides in those shadows, invisibly waiting to reach out and feed on your soul. Sun knew because he was one of them. He could see them with his poison green eyes.

  Normally shadow thieves were blind, led by temperature and feeding by soulsmell. But Sun was not normal. His mother had not been a shadow. He wasn't sure what she'd been, exactly, but she'd given him green eyes and a horrible skin condition to remember her by. His father had given him a lanky build, a big bulbous head, and the ability to pop in and out of shadow without having to suck souls.

  And while his father and mother may have created him, Pierre was the one who had given him a home and a life and a purpose. Pierre was the only parent Sun gave a crap about.

  But Pierre was sick and old and getting sicker and older. In the not-too-distant future, Sun would lose him. He didn't want to think about it. And yet, lately, it was all he could think about. Stupid thoughts. Stupid head.

  A snarl and a growl at his feet snapped Sun out of his melancholy. Fuzz gnashed his scary front teeth and swiped his bony black fingers at the shadow beside them. It took a moment for Sun's brain to register that the shadow thief had slipped into Sun's own shadow and was feeding upon Sun's soul.

  With some effort-thanks in no small part to Fuzz's distraction-Sun jumped back away from Hatch's dark shadow and the blind, hungry thief was trapped inside it.

  Sun couldn't suck souls, but Fuzz could. He was the reason the aye-aye as a species had such a nasty reputation in the first place. Fuzz might have been ten times smaller than Sun, but he was a hell of a lot more intimidating.

  "Yeah, yeah. So you're a big shot," said Sun. "Rub it in."

  Fuzz responded by displaying one of his disproportionately distended middle fingers. With a yawn, he deftly crawled back into the sweeper.

  Sun laughed, grabbed his broom, and went back to work.

  "When I pass on, Sun, ze sweeper, she is for you, no?" It had been a long time since Pierre had left his tiny little colony on the coast of South America, but he'd never lost the accent.

  "No," said Sun. He washed his hands in the basin and opened the shutters to let the twilight in. Fresh air would do Pierre a world of good.

  "How can you no love ze daylight sweeper? She is a good sweeper."

  "She is a fine sweeper," Sun agreed. "I just meant no, you will not 'pass on' anytime soon. Stop talking like that."

  "We cannot stop ze sun from rising or ze moon from setting," said Pierre. "We do not live forever, mon soleil, not even these old stones. Not talking about it cannot make it so."

  "Tell that to the rest of Shadow Street," Sun muttered under his breath.

  Either Pierre did not hear him, or he just ignored the snarky comment. It was hard to tell sometimes. "I would like to work in ze garden today," Pierre mused.

  Of course he would. Sun wondered sometimes why he ever bothered showering, since he seemed destined to be covered at all times in dirt of some kind. Not that the dirt was the issue. The garden was to be Pierre's final resting place, and Sun didn't enjoy the idea of landscaping a graveyard.

  But as Sun didn't want to appear ungrateful, he said none of this. He simply went to Pierre's side, removed the tray of untouched soup, and helped his giant stony carcass out of bed like the dutiful foster child he was.

  It just didn't make any sense. If ninety-five percent of the population on Shadow Street was immortal, why did Pierre have to die? What made gargoyles so different from all the other monstrous peoples of the world?

  As soon as the question was swimming around in that giant head of his, Sun knew exactly who would have the answer.

  "Oh, crap," he said aloud.

  "Am I too heavy?" asked Pierre. He was leaning more of his weight onto Sun than usual, but Sun had grown stronger because of it.

  "No heavier than my head, fat man," said Sun. It was a long-standing joke between them. "The 'crap' was just my regret for something else."

  Pierre's knowing chortle degraded into a raspy cough. Sun hoped none of that water had managed to find a way into his lungs.

  "We make mistakes," Pierre said when he finally caught his breath. "What sets us apart are those who learn from them."

  Sun only nodded; he was afraid that if he spoke it might crack his already damaged calm. He would miss Pierre's croissant-flavored fortune-cookie wisdom. But Pierre was not gone yet. It was just stupid of Sun to miss him while he was still here. He blinked a few times and bit his tongue so that the pain would distract him from his sorrow.

  Pierre's energy did not last long-it was only an hour past full dark before they gave up on the garden and came inside for simpler pleasures. Sun made sure Pierre was all set up in his workshop, wings deep in crystals and gauges and gears, before he called it an early night.

  Pierre, deep into his tinkering, merely waved him away.

  It didn't take Sun long to find the Stoners. He slipped into the shadows and slunk the outskirts of the labyrinthine sewer system. Traveling as a shadow was faster than going on foot, but Sun couldn't shadowshift unless he fully stepped into darkness. He exited the sewers by the library and saw the gang a block away, "accepting donations" outside the library.

  Hatch's Day-Glo orange head shone like a beacon beneath the streetlights.

  Sun slipped from shadow to shadow between the chain link fence and the broken sidewalk, making sure they didn't see him until he was good and ready. He had one shot; he had to make it count.

  "Damn, Ginger, you are looking hot." Sun drew the word out and attached a sizzle and a hoot for good measure.

  The punch aimed at Sun's face swung through him. His body, with one foot still in shadow, turned to mist.

  "Grab him!" Hatch yelled through gritted teeth.

  Spoiler, with his bear body and demon face, startled Sun out of the shadows. Hinge, a hairless cat with batwings, slashed at him with his claws. Fender, a pitbull with wings, clamped his jaws around Sun's shoulder and held him down in the circle of light cast by the streetlight. There were no shadows to escape to and-even if he could break free of Fender's grip-nowhere to run.

  They beat him half to death.

  Sun's brain reminded him that if he didn't fight it, if he tried to relax and didn't tense his muscles, it would hurt less. Sun's muscles, seeing Hatch's fists and feet flying at him like stone barbells, told his brain to go screw itself and braced for impact.

  He squirmed and shifted and attempted to dodge when he could, but Fender's jaws held tight. Sun also tried to get a word in between thrashings, before he lost too many teeth to be understood.

  "I--" Bash to the head. Stupid head.

  "-- need --" Ribs cracking. One, maybe two.

  "-- your --" Hot lines dug with razor blade claws down his back. Fire.

  "-- help --" Pretty sure that last crack was his left arm bone.

  "-- please."

  That was the word that stopped them. Sun didn't know why. He was sure some of their devoted fans had yelled the same thing while having their stuffing extracted. Perhaps it was his tone.

  Spoiler's split tongue darted out. "Did he jusssst ssssay . . .?"

  "Mm-I fink sho," Fender said b
efore spitting out Sun's shoulder in a shower of drool. Sun's limp body tumbled to the ground. His ruined shirt caught on one of Fender's jutting fangs and ripped to shreds. He didn't have the strength to care.

  "Wow," barked Fender.

  "What the hell is that?" said Hinge.

  "He'ssss a freak," said Spoiler.

  Leave it to Hatch to be the only Stoner without ADD. "What kind of freak moron asks for help from the ones kicking his ass?"

  Honestly, Sun had pretty much counted on dying right there in the street, or at least losing consciousness before they could have a meaningful conversation. If one could have a meaningful conversation with a gang of ugly, blockheaded statues named after car parts. There was so much to explain. However, the Stoners had brains the size of walnuts, and Sun only had enough energy to get to the point.

  "Pierre's . . . dying."

  "That don't make no damn sense." Sun didn't try to open his eyes; even if he could, he'd be staring at blood-soaked pavement. But he could hear Hatch laughing at him. "Pierre's only from . . ." he snapped his fingers at his cohorts for the answer.

  "Devil'sssss Island," offered Spoiler.

  "See? There are real French gargoyles way older than him. He should live forever."

  "Nobody lives forever." Fender's voice was deep and gravelly.

  "Shut up, Fender," said Hatch. "Maybe it's all that water. All water eats away stone eventually. No getting around that."

  That might have been the most intelligent thing Hatch had said in his whole life. Sun tried not to look shocked.

  "But there are other beings on this street who live forever." Hinge would know, he had nine or so lives himself.

  "How-" Sun coughed and spat the blood out of his mouth to make room for his tongue. He tried to lift himself up and failed completely. Broken arm. Broken ribs. "How do you make stone live forever?" he asked into the sidewalk when he caught his breath again.

  "What else lives forever?" asked Fender.

  "Vampiresssss," said Spoiler.

  "Gargoyles have no blood," said Hatch.