Robots vs. Fairies(84)
His words, on the other hand, show the truth of him: he belongs to another world, and Nettie Lonesome doesn’t give a shit about magic eyes or jewels or dancing or pretty fairy babies or unearned luck. She’s got to kill what needs to die, and she can’t do that where they come from because nothing dies in Fairy. Ever.
Nettie snaps her chin out of his reach, closing her eyes to the silly but cloying dreams he showed her. “No thanks. I got to get back to rangering. I’ll just take your man, and return him to . . .”
They all look over to find a pair of golden manacles on the ground.
“That son of a bitching possum!” Rudebaugh shouts, but he’s just a man again, a trapper in skins drawing his bowie knife, all raiment of glamour faded.
Bonney claps his hands together, and it’s like lightning striking the glade in a blinding flash of light.
The trees are dead again. The chairs are gone. The fire is gone. The dented coffeepot is gone. The cloaks and crowns and otherworldly beauty are definitely gone. There’s nothing but the full moon, Billy the Kid, his posse, and the chains their quarry slipped while they were showing off their skills. While Nettie watches, the manacles’ metal fades from solid gold to rusted iron. She doesn’t mind a bit that the fairies are wearing their masks again. She prefers them this way, not showing off. Magic’s one hell of a distraction.
“If you’ll excuse me, fellers, I’m free to go, ain’t I?” she asks.
“Without your man,” Billy says with a grin. “The contest was three to two, but I guess I’ll consider it a tie now.” He passes an open hand before her face and murmurs, “Forget us and go.”
Nettie tips her invisible hat. “Nice gambling with you boys,” she says.
As she walks into the woods, she unties the gold sash. Safely in the shadows, she lets the cloak drop, then her humanity. The great bird shakes itself, sick to death of magic. It launches into the air and surveys the moonlit desert below.
All it sees are four road-worn cowpokes arguing as they tighten the saddles of their horses. The leader smacks the youngest one, knocking his hat to the dust. The bird doesn’t know why, but it turns and flaps in the other direction. Farther on, it catches sight of movement and swoops down to snatch up a quickly waddling possum, which it immediately drops. Possums, the bird seems to recall, are not worth the trouble.
TEAM FAIRY
* * *
BY DELILAH S. DAWSON WRITING AS LILA BOWEN
One of the most formative moments of my young life was watching Labyrinth for the first time and deciding I would’ve just forgotten the whiny baby and stayed with the Goblin King forever. I was drawn to the strange beauty, power, and darkness of that world, where maps and clocks didn’t quite make sense and the air always seemed to glitter. I’ve never written a fairy story before, but I knew they’d be a great fit for the world of the Shadow, where Nettie Lonesome is tasked with hunting dangerous monsters and bringing them to justice. The fae are a great foil to no-nonsense Nettie, who sees through glamour and flat-out doesn’t have time for such frivolity. And when it came to deciding how the fae would appear in an alternate 1800s Texas, I thought about the biggest peacock of the West, Billy the Kid—or, to be more accurate, my love of Young Guns II. You know, the movie with Bon Jovi’s “Blaze of Glory” following Billy and his posse around the desert on a killing spree? After all, they’ve never found Billy the Kid’s body. He could totally be a badass fairy.
There weren’t any robots in Labyrinth or Young Guns II. Just sayin’.
ALL THE TIME WE’VE LEFT TO SPEND
by Alyssa Wong
When she got to Yume’s room, the first thing Ruriko did was slip off her mask and remove her prosthetic jaw. There was an ache in her fake bottom teeth. It was going to rain, although one look at the sky could have told her that.
Across the room, Yume dimmed the lights and sat on the edge of the coverlet. The bed was obscenely red, round and mounted on a rotatable platform, as one could expect from a pay-by-the-hour love hotel. Yume’s pale, gauzy skirt rode up her thighs as she shifted positions, and Ruriko wished she would tug it back over her knees. “Is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”
Ruriko checked each of her false teeth, pressing a thumb over them to see if any had come loose—it was time for a hardware checkup soon—before clicking the prosthesis back into place. None of the actual teeth, or even the joints, were acting up. Some kind of phantom pain, then, from the flesh-and-bone jaw she’d lost ten years ago. “No, I’m okay.”
“I could put on some music.” Ten years ago, Yume Ito had been one of the four founding members of IRIS, one of the country’s top teen idol groups. Her face, along with Miyu Nakamura’s, Kaori Aoki’s, and Rina Tanaka’s, had graced advertisements all over Tokyo, from fragrance ads to television commercials to printed limited-edition posters. But then the real Yume Ito had died, along with the real Miyo Nakamura, Kaori Aoki, and Rina Tanaka, and now all that was left was an algorithm of her mannerisms and vocal patterns, downloaded into an artificial skin and frame.
“No music, please,” said Ruriko. Her voice sounded strange and small, but too loud at the same time. “Just talking.”
Yume, dead ten years, rested her hands on Ruriko’s shoulders. Her fingers traced the cloth mask that hung from one ear like a wilted flag. She tucked it back over Ruriko’s reassembled mouth. “Whatever you want us to do.”