Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (2 page)

Leah Cutter’s story has no investigator, just
one marvelously courageous young girl, who takes an important
personal stand. I first read this story in June, and like all great
fiction, it has become a cherished memory. After you read
“Sisters,” you’ll never look at ceremonies the same again.

When we asked Richard Bowes for a story, I
expected something like the New York tales he used to write for me
at
F&SF
. Instead, he sent what seems like a traditional
fantasy tale, with a witch and enchanted characters. But in typical
Rick Bowes’ fashion, he takes an expected world and makes it
unexpected, keeping all of that emotion that makes Rick Bowes’s
fiction so very powerful.

Jane Yolen’s “Dog Boy Remembers” took my
breath away when I read it. The story seems so simple and yet it’s
not simple at all. Jane has long carved out a unique place in the
fantasy genre, and no fantasy volume would be complete without her
work. You’ll remember Dog Boy long after you close this book.

David Farland wrote a Runelords story just
for us. Runelords is parallel worlds fiction masquerading as epic
fantasy. Epic fantasy is hard to write in the short form, but Dave,
whose original incarnation was award-winning short fiction writer
Dave Wolverton, is more than up to the task. “Barbarians” is a
powerful tale that will inspire some of you to read the Runelords
saga and remind the rest of you why you read it in the first
place.

The breadth of the stories here astonish me.
What astonishes me even more is that all of these authors were
willing to work with us on our return to editing, despite other
deadlines and commitments. We’re lucky to have such a fantastic
group of writers and the fruits of their incredible
imaginations.

The worlds here might be unnatural, but
they’re also quite impressive. And I think Devon’s title says it
best. I feel as if this volume shows us the life between
dreams.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln City, Oregon

March 11, 2013

Introduction to “Life
Between Dreams”

Readers love Devon Monk’s Allie Beckstrom
urban fantasy series and her Age of Steam steampunk series, but our
favorite remains her short stories. You can find some of her best
in the 2010 collection from Fairwood Press,
A Cup of Normal
.
She has a new fantasy series premiering soon called Broken Magic.
“A Life Between Dreams” isn’t part of any of those series,
however.

Devon says this was “one of those rare
stories that sort of fell off my fingertips. I had recently ended a
nine-book series and found myself thinking about life’s many
endings and beginnings and all the small and large sacrifices and
choices we make between them.”

Endings and beginnings. How appropriate for
the first volume of the Fiction River series.

Life Between Dreams

Devon Monk

Mary Still dropped the screwdriver back into
the empty coffee can next to the jar of Moebius clock oil, and held
her breath. From just beyond the open door of the garage she heard
the distinct glassy
tink
of this reality colliding with
another. Someone, or something, was crossing the boundary.

The sound could be nothing, just the random
scrape and rattle of the joined universes steering a little too
wide around the corners.

It could be the bosses, who said they’d be
here in exactly one hour to see that the outpost was secure and to
reassign her a new partner if Tom didn’t return.

Or it could be Tom.

She hoped it was Tom. But she hadn’t seen her
partner for six months now, not since the job they’d almost failed
in East London with the dreamer kid. She’d walked away from that
with a much finer appreciation for the rules of dispelling terrors
and imaginings.

Tom had just walked away.

She picked up a tire iron and a wooden cross,
and moved back from the nineteenth century Regina music box she’d
been restoring, even though she had yet to find a comb to make it
sing. No need to lose paying customers just because she had to
fight nightmare creatures from another dimension, or worse, her
bosses.

She strolled up to the door and opened it.
Being quiet and sneaky around terrors and imaginings never worked.
Walls didn’t stop them, doors didn’t hold them back, and stealth
was a waste of time.

Still, she hesitated there in the cool shadow
of the garage and stared out at the Nevada sunlight pouring over
the rocks and orange dirt in front of her shop. Highway 90 lay like
a black snake warming itself over the arid land, curving down out
of Goldfield up north and missing her place by an eighth of a mile
or so.

Wind hissed through the sage brush and set
the insects buzzing.

A man stepped up to the front porch of her
shop.

He was medium build, brushing six feet tall
and wore a black wool coat that reached almost to his knees, his
jeans tucked into the top of hunting boots. His dark hair was
brushed up and away from his face, even though it was several
inches too long to hold the style, and he was in need of a
shave.

Hands shoved in his coat pockets, he paused
to read the sign above her entryway:
Still Curious Antique
Restoration
.

“You put my name on the sign?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, not lowering cross or bar
yet. “Good to see you, Tom. You owe me half a year’s overhead on
the place.”

He turned his head, tipped down his
sunglasses. “Good to see you too, Mary.”

She swallowed against a mix of anger and
relief that rushed through her. He still had a soul behind those
eyes. He was still human. That was good. Very good.

“Are you going to put your sticks down yet?”
He gave a slight nod toward the cross and crowbar.

“No. But you might as well go inside. The
coffee should be done brewing.”

He hesitated. Maybe he didn’t want her at his
back. She was angry, and he was pretty good at reading her emotions
even though no one else ever was.

“Are you worried I’m going to knock you out
when you’re not looking?” she asked as she strode across the dirt,
her boots kicking up clouds of cinnamon dust.

“It crossed my mind.”

“You’d deserve it.”

“Yes,” he said, “I would.”

And that was that. They were partners again.
Everyone got their one time out, their one time to break away from
the job and never come back. No one would chase them down if they
decided to just quit.

Coming back meant the next unapproved time
off would be in a coffin.

“That was your one chance, you know,” she
said as they stepped into the darker, but not much cooler,
shop.

The place was filled with rare items she’d
restored through normal, and inter-dimensional means. Shelves and
corners were stacked with antiques and other valuables. Need a
bellows for your harmonium or a Tiffany lamp base plate? She’d find
it in this world, or cross a few boundaries and find one that was
still intact in an alternate dimension.

The bosses didn’t love the idea of
trans-dimensional Dumpster diving, but a girl had to make ends meet
between gigs of saving the world.

“To get away?” He paused to pick up a crystal
goblet and ran his thumb over the water-smooth glass. He put it
down, then briefly brushed his fingers over the velvet of the case
it was settled in. “I know.”

She followed him, watching how he walked:
subtle limp on the right, boots landing just a little too heavily
on the floorboards, left arm pressed against his side. He’d been
hurt, maybe still was, and he was exhausted. Would the bosses
notice? Of course they would, they noticed everything.

“Where’ve you been, Curious?” she asked after
they’d left the antique shop behind and pushed open the door that
only unlocked for them.

“Over the edges,” he said.

They were through the living room that she
rarely used, and finally in the very modern, very well-stocked
kitchen.

The warm, home-and-comfort smell of brewed
coffee softened the stark white and chrome of the place. If she’d
had a choice, the kitchen wouldn’t look like a laboratory outfitted
by Ikea. But this wasn’t so much her home, as an outpost.

“Not where I’d go to get my head together,”
she said.

He nodded and dragged fingertips across the
counter top as he walked to the coffee pot.

She didn’t blame him for wanting to touch
everything. Running off into dimensions that are almost exact
duplicates of your world, but never quite right, meant that once
you got home, you wanted to hug it, roll in it, and press reality
tight against you.

Hold the people there tightly too.

“That’s not why I left.” He poured coffee in
one white china cup. “Not to get my head together.” He filled a
matching cup, retrieved the cream and watched the pure white muddle
the darkness as he poured.

“All right. Why?”

He turned with the coffees in his hands.
“You’ll want to be sitting for this, Still.”

She rolled her eyes and plunked down in a
chrome and white chair next to the chrome and white table.

He placed her cup on the table in front of
her as if afraid to actually touch her yet, then held his cup under
his nose and inhaled. His eyes closed and the tension he’d been
trying to hide drifted away, leaving his face in the meditative
expression of peace.

If touch in the home dimension was good, food
was even better. And sex...well, it was worth coming home for.

He finally took a drink and made a pleased
sound in the back of his throat. When he opened his eyes again, he
gave her that smile she’d fallen for too many times, then leaned
back against the counter.

She noted he kept most his weight off his
right foot.

“You remember our last job?” he asked.

“Hard to forget almost dying.”

“And the kid there in East London?”

“Harder to forget the boy with terrors so
strong he could have ended this dimension.”

She said it easy, flat, but it had been the
most frightening job of her life. They’d nearly not made it back
from fighting the monsters that kid had dreamed up. His terrors had
crossed into twelve dimensions before they could stop them, and had
done permanent damage to this reality too.

That earthquake and tsunami? Yeah, that was
the East London kid dreamer.

“I went back to see him.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s a little
outside protocol.” It was a lot outside of protocol.

“He started dreaming again.”

It happened sometimes. They could do certain
things to make sure terrors and imaginings didn’t plague people,
but occasionally it wasn’t enough. And when that happened, protocol
said they had to remove the person from their home reality, drag
them out to a dimension so distant, their terrors were weakened and
unable to affect any reality.

They became a name on a missing person
report, or sometimes were replaced with a near-dimension version of
themselves.

“Why didn’t you call me? I could have
helped.”

“I didn’t relocate him out across edges.”

“So you killed him.”

“No.”

Her stomach clenched. “What did you do? It’s
relocate or kill, Tom. There isn’t any other option.”

The look on his face said that there was.

“What did you do to him, Curious?”

“I made a deal.”

“With him?”

“With his terrors.”

A second or two ticked by while she tried to
process that. “What?”

“I put the kid down into a deep sleep and
called them out. Then I told them I wouldn’t destroy them, wouldn’t
hunt them if we could come to an understanding.”

“So you destroyed them.”

“No. We came to an understanding.”

Crazy. No one negotiated with imaginaries. No
one made deals with monsters.

Except, apparently, her partner.

“What deal?”

“They’d leave the kid. Empty out completely.
And take me instead.”

“And you believed them? Believed the promise
of monsters? Why?” She had a hard time keeping her voice down. “Why
would you do such a stupid, dangerous thing?”

“He’s my son.”

Mary Still closed her mouth and shook her
head, trying to make sense of what he was saying. They were
partners, yes. They’d had sex. But they’d never admitted they were
in love.

“When?” she said quietly. “He must be six or
seven?”

“He’s six. I met his mother in France, spring
that year,” he added.

Seven years ago. They’d just been assigned
this warden outpost that summer, met for the first time at the
briefing before taking up their new assignment as partners.

“How long have you known?”

He took another drink of coffee, the tension
folding the corners of his eyes and drawing lines between his
eyebrows. “Figured it out six months ago. When he almost killed
us.”

“Do you want to be in his life?” she
asked.

“His mother married a couple months after we
met. He already has a father who thinks he’s his own. I was just
her last chance fling.”

“You know this is bad,” she said.

“I know.”

“You know we can’t have children. That if we
do—”

“—they’ll become conduits for terrors and
imaginings across multi-realities.”

No wonder the kid was so strong. He had
warden blood in him. “He’s a trans-dimensional beacon,” she said.
“Every terror in the known realities can find him.”

“Me,” Curious replied. “Every terror in the
known realities can find me now.”

“Then why haven’t they?”

“They have.” He finished his coffee. “I have
the bruises and broken bones to prove it.”

“Why haven’t they found you now, here?”

He twisted, winced when he couldn’t quite
reach the counter to rest his cup there. “Well, I haven’t slept in
three days, and I haven’t stayed in one reality for more than an
hour or two.”