Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(54)

“I’ve never seen you.”

“Haven’t you? As a child, didn’t you once catch me peering in your bedroom window? Didn’t you glimpse me lurking in an alley? Didn’t you visit me at the bio that day? Don’t I live beneath your daughter’s bed and in your dreams?”

And now Nix does reach into her left hip pouch for the antipsychotics there. She takes a single step backwards and her boot comes down in the warm, stagnant pool, sinking in up to the ankle. The splash seems very loud, louder than the atonal symphony of dragonflies buzzing in her ears. She wants to look away from the someone or something she only imagines there before her, a creature more canine than human, an abomination that might have been created in an illicit sub rosa recombinant-outcross lab back on earth. A commission for a wealthy collector, for a private menagerie of designer freaks. Were the creature real. Which it isn’t.

Nix tries to open the Mylar med packet, but it slips through her fingers and vanishes in the underbrush. The thing licks its muzzle with a mottled blue-black tongue, and Shiloh’s eyes sparkle from its face.

“Are you going across the stones or the thorns?” it asks.

“Excuse me?” Nix croaks, her throat parched, her mouth gone cottony. Why did I answer it. Why am I speaking with it at all?

It scowls.

“Don’t play dumb, Nix.”

It knows my name.

It only knows my name because I know my name.

“Which path are you taking? The one of needles or the one of pins?”

? 171 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

“I couldn’t reach the crawls,” she hears herself say, as though the words are reaching her ears from a great distance. “I tried, but the ladder was broken.”

“Then you are on the Road of Needles,” the creature replies, curling back its dark lips in a parody of a smile and revealing far too many sharp yellow teeth. “You surprise me, Petit Chaperon rouge. I am so rarely ever surprised.”

Enough . . .

My ship is dying all around me, and that’s enough, I will not f*cking see this. I will not waste my time conversing with my id.

Nix Severn turns away, turning much too quickly and much too carelessly, almost falling face first into the pool. It no longer matters to her how deep the water might be or what might be lurking below the surface. She stumbles ahead, sending out sprays of the tea-colored water with every step she takes. They sparkle like gems beneath the artificial sun. The mud sucks at her feet, and soon she’s in up to her chest. But even drowning would be better, she assures herself. Even drowning would be better.





5.


Nix has been at Shackleton Relay for almost a week, and it will be almost another week before a shuttle ferries her to the CTV

Blackbird, waiting in dockside orbit. The cafeteria lights are too bright, like almost everything else in the station, but at least the food is decent. That’s a popular myth among the techs and co-op officers who never actually spend time at Shackleton, that the food is all but inedible. Truthfully, it’s better than most of what she got growing up.

She listens while another EOT sitter talks, and she pokes at her bowl of udon, snow peas, and tofu with a pair of blue plastic chopsticks.

“I prefer straight up freight runs,” Marshall Choudhury says around a mouthful of noodles. “But terras, they’re not as hinky as some of the caps make them out to be. You get redundant safeguards out the anus.”

“Far as I’m concerned,” she replies, “cargo is cargo. Jaunts are jaunts.”

? 172 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

Marshall sets down his own bowl, lays his chopsticks on the counter beside it.

“Right,” he says. “You’ll get no kinda donnybrook here. None at all.

Just my pref, that’s it. Less hassle hauling hardware and whatnot, less coddling the payload. More free for dream-away.”

Nix shrugs and chews a pea pod, swallows, and tells him, “Fella, here on my end, the chips are chips, however I may earn them. I’m just happy to have the work.”

“Speaking of which . . . ” Marshall says, then trails off.

“That your concern now, Choudhury, my personal life?”

“Just one fella’s consideration for a comrade’s, all.”

“Well, as you’ve asked, Shiloh is still nagging me about hooking something in the yards.” She sets her bowl down and stares at the broth in the bottom. “Like she didn’t know when I married her, like she didn’t know before Maia, that I was EOT and had no intent or interest in ever working anything other than offworld.”