Robots vs. Fairies(69)

“I’ll let you be a Found Girl again. You’ll fly and dance and play and believe. You’ll be happy.”

I stopped walking. “I’m too old.”

“You don’t have to be.”

It struck me that Tinker Bell wasn’t angry anymore. Her rage would return soon enough, but right now there was no room for it. Right now, she was afraid.

“You can be one of my children. I’ll be your mother again.”

Had I been happy? I knew I hadn’t wanted to leave. I remembered sobbing and screaming after her the night she left me behind.

I also remembered the four girls we’d stolen that night, and the man who’d fought so desperately to stop us.

When he found me, his grief and anger hadn’t changed, but another emotion joined them—compassion. He’d driven me to the hospital, made sure I was cared for. He never threatened or tried to hurt me. He simply asked—begged—for me to tell him how to find his children.

I couldn’t help him. Just like I couldn’t help Lillian.

I remembered my screams the night Lillian’s breathing finally stopped. Listening to the howling wind, I realized I’d never stopped screaming.

I twisted around and hovered directly in front of Tinker Bell. “I wonder,” I said carelessly, “how long it will take them to forget you.”

She brightened with fury as I flew away. I plunged through the willow trees. Tinker Bell followed, but I knew this place. I’d fought its hazards. I tore through branches that reached to drag us down. I dodged the numbing claws. I flew higher, shielding my eyes against the sudden rainfall.

It wasn’t long until the ringing of bells fell behind and faded into silence.

*

Of course the Neverland had been make-believe in those days, but it was real now. . . .

—J. M. Barrie

*

The Found Girls were waiting in the darkness around the trailer. They scattered when they realized I’d returned alone. Those few who still bore active fairy dust flew away like birds. The rest scampered like rabbits.

I swooped toward Clover and knocked her down in a patch of grass toward the edge of the trailer park. She tried to fight, but I caught her wrist and pried the blade from her hand.

She fought and kicked and bit and cried. I wrapped my arms around her and held tight so she couldn’t hurt herself.

She tried to claw my arms. I adjusted my grip and waited. Minutes passed, or maybe hours, until time extinguished the last glimmer of our fairy dust.

“I want to fly,” she whispered furiously.

“I know.” Neither of us would ever fly again. “Your mother asked me to find you. Your parents miss you. Do you remember them?”

She shook harder and buried her face in my arm.

I looked over at the trailer. I knew where and who Peter was now, but I couldn’t come back. Not yet. There were too many parents like Gwen Akerman. Too many families that had never stopped screaming. Too many girls now lost and afraid, facing that terrible journey back.

Purpose took root in the stone inside me. I couldn’t make that journey for them, but I could be their compass. I could help them along the way.

For now, I simply held Clover in my arms. Two Found Girls, grieving together.





TEAM FAIRY




* * *



BY JIM C. HINES

Why do I write about fairies and fairy tales instead of robots? Let me put it this way. Fairies are a reflection and distillation of humanity, boiled down to one pure emotion at a time. Robots are a reflection and distillation of a toaster oven. All things considered, writing about Tinker Bell was an easy choice. Like the other female characters in Peter and Wendy, Barrie’s treatment of Tinker Bell has problems. She’s in turn self-centered, jealous, vain, vindictive, and homicidal. By the end of the book, Tinker Bell is dead and Peter has literally forgotten all about her. But we know she’s dodged death once already, because children believed in fairies. . . . Tinker Bell might be a common fairy, but she’s also a tinkerer, with the kind of mind that likes to figure out how things work. And now she knows how to beat death. This is where “Second to the Left” came from: a Tinker Bell with shades of the old fairy tales, powerful and worshipped. A character who could be an unapologetic villain. A character whose nature allows us to explore our own humanity, one raw emotion at a time.





THE BURIED GIANT


by Lavie Tidhar

When I was five or six years old, my best friend was Mowgai Khan, who was Aislinn Khan’s youngest. He was a spidery little thing, “full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. His eyes shone like blackberries in late summer. When he was very small, the Khans undertook the long, hard journey to Tyr, along the blasted planes, and in that settlement Mowgai was equipped with a composite endoskeleton, which allowed him to walk, in however curious a fashion. On the long summer days, which seemed never to end, Mowgai and I would roam freely over the Land, collecting wild berries by the stream or picking pine nuts from the fallen cones in the forest, and we would debate for hours the merits or otherwise of Elder Simeon’s intricate clockwork automatons, and we would try to catch fish in the stream, but we never did catch anything.

It was a long, hot summer: the skies were a clear and uninterrupted lavender blue, with only smudges of white cloud on the horizon like streaks of paint, and when the big yellow sun hung high in the sky we would seek shelter deep in the forest, where the breeze stirred the pine needles sluggishly and where we could sit with our backs to the trunks of old mottled pines, between the roots, eating whatever lunch we had scavenged at home in the morning on our way. Eating dark bread and hard cheese and winter kimchee, we felt we knew all the whole world, and had all the time in it, too: it is a feeling that fades and can never return once lost, and all the more precious for that. For dessert we ate slices of watermelon picked only an hour or so earlier from the ground. The warm juice ran down our chins and onto our hands and we spat out the small black pips on the ground, where they stared up at us like hard eyes.