Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(50)

Something soft, weighing hardly anything at all, lands on her cheek.

Startled, she opens her eyes and brushes it away. It falls into a nearby clump of moss and gazes up with golden eyes. Its body is a harlequin motley of brilliant yellow and a blue so deep as to be almost black.

A frog.

She’s seen images of frogs archived in the lattice, and in reader files, but images cannot compare to contact with one alive and breathing.

It touched her cheek, and now it’s watching her. If Oma were online, Nix would ask for a more specific identification.

But, of course, if Oma were online, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

She wipes the rain from her eyes. The droplets are cool against her skin. On her lips, on her tongue, they’re nectar. It’s easy to romanticize Paradise when you’ve only ever known Hell and (on a good day) Purgatory. It’s hard not to get sentimental; the mind, giddy from clean air, waxes. Nix blinks up at all the shades of green; she squints into the simulated sunlight shining down between the branches.

The sky flickers, dimming for a moment, then quickly returns to its full 600-watt brilliance. The back-up fuel cells are draining faster than they ought. She ticks off possible explanations: there might be a catalyst leak, dinged up cathodes or anodes, a membrane breach impairing ion-exchange. Or maybe she’s just lost track of time. She ? 162 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

checks the counter in her left retina, but maybe it’s on the fritz again and can’t be trusted. She rubs at her eye, because sometimes that helps. The readout remains the same. The cells have fallen to forty-eight percent maximum capacity.

I haven’t lost track of time. The train’s burning through the reserves too fast. It doesn’t matter why.

All that matters is that she has less time to reach Oma and try to fix this f*ck-up.

Nix Severn stands, but it seems to take her almost forever to do so.

She leans against the rough bark of the tree fern and tries to make out the straight line of the catwalk leading to the port ’tainers and the decks beyond. Moving over and through the uneven, ever-shifting terrain of the forest is slowing her down, and soon, she knows, soon she’ll be forced to abandon it for the cramped maintenance crawls suspended far overhead. She curses herself for not having used them in the first place. But better late than f*cking never. They’re a straight line to the main AI shaft, and wriggling her way through the empty tubes will help her focus, removing her senses from the Edenic seduction of the terraforming engines’ grand wrack-up. If she can just reach the front of this compartment, there will be an access ladder, and cramped or not, the going will surely be easier. She’ll quick it double time or better. Nix wipes the rain from her face again, and clambers over the roots of a strangler fig. Once on the slippery, overgrown walkway, she lowers the jumpsuit’s visor and quilted silicon hood; the faceplate will efficiently evaporate both the rain and any condensation. She does her best to ignore the forest. She thinks, instead, of making dockside, waiting out quarantine until she’s cleared for tumble, earthfall, and of her lover and daughter waiting for her, back in the slums at the edge of the Phoenix shipyards. She keeps walking.





2.


Skycaps launch alone.

Nix closes the antique storybook she found in a curio stall at the Firestone Night Market, and she sets it on the table next to her ? 163 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

daughter’s bed. The pages are brown and brittle, and minute bits of the paper flake away if she does not handle it with the utmost care (and sometimes when she does). Only twice in Maia’s life has she heard a fairy tale read directly from the book. On the first occasion, she was two. And on the second, she was six. It’s a long time between lifts and drops, and when you’re a mother whose also a runner, your child seems to grow up in jittery stills from a time-lapse. Even with her monthly broadcast allotment, that’s how it seems. A moment here, fifteen minutes there, a three-week shore leave, a precious to-and-fro while sailing orbit, the faces and voices trickling through in 22.29 or 3.03 light-minute packages.

“Why did she talk to the wolf?” asks Maia. “Why didn’t she ignore him?”

Nix looks up to find Shiloh watching from the doorway, backlit by the glow from the hall. She smiles for the silhouette, then looks back to their daughter. The girl’s hair is as fine and pale as corn silk.

She’s fragile, born too early and born sickly, half crippled, half blind.

Maia’s eyes are the milky green color of jade.