The blood is gone when he sits back. As though she imagined it.
“You should not have left like that yesterday,” he says. “Charles can make this harder than I’d like.”
“Why is he here?” she asks. She breathes shallowly.
“He will take over Grade Gold once your transmutation is finished.”
“That’s why you brought me here, isn’t it? It had nothing to do with the kids.”
He shrugs. “Regulations. So Charles couldn’t refuse.”
“And where will you go?”
“They want to send me to the mainland. Texas. To supervise the installation of a new Grade Gold facility near Austin.”
She leans closer to him, and now she can see it: regret, and shame that he should be feeling so. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“I have lived seventy years on these islands. I have an eternity to come back to them. So will you, Key. I have permission to bring you with me.”
Everything that sixteen-year-old had ever dreamed. She can still feel the pull of him, of her desire for an eternity together, away from the hell her life has become. Her transmutation would be complete. Truly a monster, the regrets for her past actions would fall away like waves against a seawall.
With a fumbling hand, she picks a cherimoya from the ground beside her. “Do you remember what these taste like?”
She has never asked him about his human life. For a moment, he seems genuinely confused. “You don’t understand. Taste to us is vastly more complex. Joy, dissatisfaction, confusion, humility—those are flavors. A custard apple?” He laughs. “It’s sweet, right?”
Joy, dissatisfaction, loss, grief, she tastes all that just looking at him.
“Why didn’t you ever feed from me before?”
“Because I promised. When we first met.”
And as she stares at him, sick with loss and certainty, Rachel walks up behind him. She is holding a kitchen knife, the blade pointed toward her stomach.
“Charles knows,” she says.
“How?” Tetsuo says. He stands, but Key can’t coordinate her muscles enough for the effort. He must have drained a lot of blood.
“I told him,” Rachel says. “So now you don’t have a choice. You will transmute me and you will get rid of this fucking fetus or I will kill myself and you’ll be blamed for losing two Grade Gold humans.”
Rachel’s wrists are still bruised from where Key had to hold her several nights ago. Her eyes are sunken, her skin sallow. This fucking fetus.
She wasn’t trying to kill herself with the cherimoya seeds. She was trying to abort a pregnancy.
“The baby is still alive after all that?” Key says, surprisingly indifferent to the glittering metal in Rachel’s unsteady hands. Does Rachel know how easily Tetsuo could disarm her? What advantage does she think she has? But then she looks back in the girl’s eyes and realizes: none.
Rachel is young and desperate and she doesn’t want to be eaten by the monsters anymore.
“Not again, Rachel,” Tetsuo says. “I can’t do what you want. A vampire can only transmute someone he’s never fed from before.”
Rachel gasps. Key flops against her tree. She hadn’t known that, either. The knife trembles in Rachel’s grip so violently that Tetsuo takes it from her, achingly gentle as he pries her fingers from the hilt.
“That’s why you never drank from her? And I killed her anyway? Stupid fucking Penelope. She could have been forever, and now there’s just this dumb fogie in her place. She thought you cared about her.”
“Caring is a strange thing, for a vampire,” Key says.
Rachel spits in her direction but it falls short. The moonlight is especially bright tonight; Key can see everything from the grass to the tips of Rachel’s ears, flushed sunset pink.
“Tetsuo,” Key says, “why can’t I move?”
But they ignore her.
“Maybe Charles will do it if I tell him you’re really the one who killed Penelope.”
“Charles? I’m sure he knows exactly what you did.”
“I didn’t mean to kill her!” Rachel screams. “Penelope was going to tell about the baby. She was crazy about babies, it didn’t make any sense, and you had picked her and she wanted to destroy my life… I was so angry, I just wanted to hurt her, but I didn’t realize…”
“Rachel, I’ve tried to give you a chance, but I’m not allowed to get rid of it for you.” Tetsuo’s voice is as worn out as a leathery orange.
“I’ll die before I go to one of those mommy farms, Tetsuo. I’ll die and take my baby with me.”
“Then you will have to do it yourself.”
She gasps. “You’ll really leave me here?”
“I’ve made my choice.”
Rachel looks down at Key, radiating a withering contempt that does nothing to blunt Key’s pity. “If you had picked Penelope, I would have understood. Penelope was beautiful and smart. She’s the only one who ever made it through half of that fat Shakespeare book in unit four. She could sing. Her breasts were perfect. But her? She’s not a choice. She’s nothing at all.”
The silence between them is strained. It’s as if Key isn’t there at all. And soon, she thinks, she won’t be.
“I’ve made my choice,” Key says.
“Your choice?” they say in unison.
When she finds the will to stand, it’s as though her limbs are hardly there at all, as though she is swimming in mid-air. For the first time, she understands that something is wrong.
Key floats for a long time. Eventually, she falls. Tetsuo catches her.
“What does it feel like?” Key asks. “The transmutation?”
Tetsuo takes the starlight in his hands. He feeds it to her through a glass shunt growing from a living branch. The tree’s name is Rachel. The tree is very sad. Sadness is delicious.
“You already know,” he says.
You will understand: he said this to her when she was human. I wouldn’t hurt you: she said this to a girl who—a girl—she drinks.
“I meant to refuse.”
“I made a promise.”
She sees him for a moment crouched in the back of her father’s shed, huddled away from the dangerous bar of light that stretches across the floor. She sees herself, terrified of death and so unsure. Open the door, she tells that girl, too late. Let in the light.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST NOVELLA
EXCERPT FROM CALENDRICAL REGRESSION
LAWRENCE M. SCHOEN
Lawrence M. Schoen has been nominated for three Nebula Awards, a Hugo Award, and, in 2007, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Calendrical Regression was published by NobelFusion Press.
The pirate queen was a young brunette who in another life might have been a celebrity spokesperson. She glanced down at her wounded arm, attempted to raise it and failed. Instead she passed her photonic cutlass to her other hand. The move required less than a second, and to the chagrin of her alien opponent she brought the blade up in an effective block and managed to force him back. He stumbled and an instant later she struck the weapon from his grasp in a shower of high velocity sparks that caused his phlox-colored hair to stand on end.
“Where does a pirate learn to do that?” gasped the Auditor in Black, his fishbelly white skin a stark contrast to his ebony suit—marking him as a Clarkeson, a colony creature pretending to be a humanoid. His feet slid on the ever slicker surface of the dirigible as it descended toward the swamp below and the humid air condensed upon its skin.