These Lifeless Things Page 14

  “I know, right? The thing is, the working part of the real reactor is about the size of a hockey puck, but you can’t just put something that small out there. It needs to look legit. People get nervous if it doesn’t.”

  She tapped the dome with her glass, making everyone around us cringe at the noise. “This is my favourite thing. We’re not doing a lot of transparent nanoceramic because of the interactive bond-degradation problem, but I begged them to make enough for the model. It took months. I utterly degraded myself. We’re not worthy, we’re not worthy!”

  “Yeah. I bet.”

  “And then I came over and me and Wing ran it over with one of the lab trucks to see if it would break. It was awesome.”

  “…Ran this over?”

  “We buffed out the tiremarks afterwards. You could blast this with a railgun and it probably wouldn’t break.” She paused, thinking, and sipped her champagne. “It might chip. Anyway, generation is fully automated, but there’s remote control just in case. See, there’s the signal array. We used the experimental molpoxy on it, the entire roof will rip off before that dish does. On the building, I mean, not here. This is all held together with superglue. The torus and shielding goes there, under the red X. Except I forgot to put one on the mockup so I had to borrow some nail polish from one of tonight’s makeup guys.”

  “A professional did your makeup? I hope you didn’t pay them.”

  “Shut up. I kept touching my face during the photoshoot. Anyway, I made sure the reactor is about the size of a golf cart, and the rest of the building is mostly safety stuff in case of storms or seismicity, and smart grid control systems to regulate the subaqueous cable distribution load and deal with surges. And make sure that it’s tuned to... to avoid... the problem we had when it was initially developed.”

  “The,” I said slowly, “problem.”

  She tilted her chin defiantly, as if one of us had said, Are you referring to the ‘problem’ that accidentally but very nearly ended the world? “I’ve had trial versions running with no issues, no harmonics. Oh, and down there, that’s the pod system for personnel in case the drones can’t reach the island.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “That,” I said, touching the top of the dome, where a half-dozen small, shiny orbs had been meticulously painted on the underside. “Is it for measurements or whatever? Wind? Waves? Are those weather balloons?”

  “Um.” She blinked.

  As one, our chins dragged themselves to the vertical, pinning our horrified stares on the high, crossed beams of the ceiling where the light refused to go.

  “Remember that one time we rode our bikes north of town,” she whispered, “and—”

  “—went to that old grain elevator because—”

  “—I wanted to test my cyclonic densities detector, and it was full of...” She carefully put her glass on the pedestal, without looking down.

  “Oh, man,” I said, still staring. “It would be awesome if those things were bats.”

  And, as if it had only been waiting for us to meet its gaze, darkness descended.

  THE THINGS BILLOWED down in silence, formless and lazy as parachutes, so that for the first moments people smiled up at them, maybe thinking it was some kind of art installation. But Johnny dove to the ground, rolling away from the roped pedestal, and I did too, just as the screaming began: one high, terrified note, quickly joined by dozens of others.

  “Everybody outside!” someone cried, but it trailed off into an awful, wet gurgle. Ballgowns and shining shoes flowed past us like water, confused with other bright things: eyes that were not eyes, just membranous lights; hair that wasn’t hair but strings of slime; feathers as far from feathers as anything you’d see in a nightmare; and worst of all, recognizably human, or imitating a human: familiar skulls, femurs, eyes mindless with pain. Feet hammered against my shoulders as I rolled into a ball, watching for Johnny, the bright winks of her metal belt.

  Many of the creatures were pulsating far outside the normal spectrum, hues you’d only see in sigils. The palms of their hands stuttered and flashed like strobe lights, sending people unseeing into the walls, to be quickly picked up by scavenging beasts while they lay stunned. Others extruded what I took to be streams of bubbling liquid but quickly proved to be tentacles, stabbing through clothing and into spines, wearing people like dangle-legged puppets high in the air, screaming and scrabbling for their pierced backs.

  People fell, were swarmed at once, flung into the air, released to fall howling into thrashing nests of teeth and limbs, splattered ichor, humans and human-monsters trading identical blows. The hall echoed with voices, the clang of dislodged weapons, crash of broken wood and bone. Someone pulled the fire alarm and that did it: time slowed to a crawl, and everything glanced off the surface of my eyes instead of sinking in.

  Up, one hand crunching over broken crystal: the bloodied rainbows of a highball glass etched with thistles. Where had Johnny gone? Her security people surely—no. Smothered in flapping wings and claws, two gunshots virtually unheard over the noise of the alarm, three shots, four, a spray of them, why would you stop shooting once you’d started, why did they have guns? Something whined past my nose: not a bullet but a human head, bodiless, mouth filled with tentacles, the tiny wings behind either ear pitted and oozing.

  A semaphore of flashing discs: there. Johnny hadn’t gone far, only crouched behind the pedestal with a silver hors-d’oeuvre tray. Good idea actually. I picked one up myself and ducked instinctively as something swooped over my head, catching in my hair for a moment with a skittering skritch That told me it had hit scalp. I flailed at it, snarling, but it was long gone, lost in the commotion.

  What spells did I know to fuck something up in here? I couldn’t remember. Maybe they hadn’t taught me any. Probably for the best. My brain was flying in a million directions, couldn’t even focus to see properly, my vision seemed washed out with fireworks of panic. At least the room was still emptying, the walking-wounded dragging the just-plain-wounded, occasionally picking up a monster that seemed more human than the others, releasing them with a cry of disgust. The escape was jittery, stop-and-start, chaos as people stopped to fight the creatures at the doors, creating bottlenecks. The human puppets swooped down, away, back, mobbing, screaming, scrabbling at people’s faces and tossing them aside.

  Johnny squealed as someone descended on her, clawing at her bare shoulders. As she kicked it away, I walloped it with the tray, casting around for a weapon—the walls, for Chrissake!

  I made it about two steps before she grabbed my wrist, and I turned in surprise only to realize that it actually was a tentacle this time. Hitting it did nothing; I turned my head away, shouting helplessly as the mass of purplish bulges and glittering teeth began to drag me away from the sword-covered walls. Its face was half-familiar, bearded, all too human except where the eyes had been replaced with something else.

  Flailing at the thing with my free arm, I unexpectedly fell on my face as it crashed into something and lost its grip, leaving my wrist with a burnt-looking ring and a dozen spots of bloodied flesh. Broken? Hope not. I spun again while it was distracted and wrenched a sword loose from its display—massive, ancient, blunt, with a chipped metal handle that stuck at once to the oozing cuts on my palm.

  Then it came into crystal focus, like a lens had swung down; Johnny met my eye and I heard her think it too, clear as words. Oh, shit. Oh, Christ. It can’t be.

  The monsters weren’t trying to kill her.

  They were trying to capture her.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my agent, Michael Curry, and my editor, David T. Moore, for believing in this story and giving it a second chance after a rocky and unpromising start.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Analog, Escape Pod, Aug
ur, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel, Beneath the Rising, is out now from Solaris Books, with the sequel A Broken Darkness due out in 2021.

  @premeesaurus

  www.premeemohamed.com.

  POLLEN FROM A FUTURE HARVEST

  DEREK KÜNSKEN

  Major Chenesai Okonkwo is an Auditor for the Sub-Saharan Union. Her mission: to find out if the Sixth Expeditionary Force’s newly discovered time gate has been compromised. Is the Union’s revolutionary discovery already doomed, eleven years in the future?

  But there is another, more personal mission. The possible murder of her husband remains unsolved. But are the two things connected? Can she navigate the world of aliens, spies, politics and time paradoxes to find the truth, and save her people’s future?

  THE DIFFICULT LOVES OF MARIA MAKILING

  WAYNE SANTOS

  Maria is, in no particular order: a concept artist at one of Canada’s biggest videogame studios, the goddess of Mount Makiling in the Philippines, and in love. And right now, being in love is her biggest problem.

  Because when Maria falls in love, tragedy and death follow—and always have. For hundreds of years. If she wants to break the cycle, it’s going to take everything a goddess, her newly-befriended, anime-obsessed demon-horse, and Canadian national treasure Margaret Atwood have to make it happen.

  THESE LIFELESS THINGS

  PREMEE MOHAMMED

  Eva is a survivor. She’s not sure what she survived, exactly, only that They invaded without warning, killed nearly all of humanity, and relentlessly attack everyone who’s left. All she can do to stay sane, in the blockaded city that’s no longer home, is keep a journal about her struggle.

  Fifty years later, Eva’s words are found by Emerson, a young anthropologist sent to the ruins to study what happened. The discovery could shed light on the Invasion, turning the unyielding mystery of the short war into a story of hope and defiance.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  HOPE HAS A PRICE

  Nick Prasad has always enjoyed a quiet life in the shadow of his best friend, child prodigy and technological genius Joanna ‘Johnny’ Chambers. But all that is about to end.

  When Johnny invents a clean reactor that could eliminate fossil fuels and change the world, she awakens primal, evil Ancient Ones set on subjugating humanity.

  From the oldest library in the world to the ruins of Nineveh, hunted at every turn, they will need to trust each other completely to survive…

  “Gasp-out-loud astonishing”

  Charlie Jane Anders

  “A wonderful adventure”

  Chuck Wendig

  “A galloping global adventure”

  Brooke Bolander

  “A perfect balance of thriller, horror and humour”

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  www.solarisbooks.com