Knot 1: Loom-Song (call-and-response)

Who lays a cloth on the night?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who pins it with needles of light?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
When the cloth dries stiff and white, what do we read?
The warp of fate, the weft of need.
Who taught the first pattern?
Someone’s grandmother’s grandmother, whose name is lost, but whose hands are blessed.

They call me Kaka, and that is not my name, but it is what I answer to. My hut faces east to the desert. And at night, when the sky dries out like the back of a fish, from my door you can see Sitaara’s cloth so clearly you’d think it will fall on your head.

This world is called Jamdani, after the cloth that is never plain. Jamdani’s mostly desert, with pockets of life surrounding the geyser deeps, the mercy cracks. All patterns live in mistakes, the sprigs blooming where the thread jumps.

From the crack’s throat, geysers shout: sometimes soft, sometimes furious, throwing up water salted bitter as grief. Around the spray, plants grow with roots clever enough to sip what would scald us. We humans built boilers and clearers to tame the water for our own mouths.

Our village too sits on a mercy crack, its houses leaning like stitches at the edge of a fray. When the geysers burst, children run with bowls, women spread cloth to catch the steam, and men curse the salt crust underfoot. If Jamdani had been woven perfectly, we would all be bones by now. Remember that when you weave and when you pray.

The old belief? Yes, I will tell you. Long before our grandmothers, when there were only five villages and seven geysers, a weaver-woman walked into the desert with a copper needle and a spool of darkness. She said: Enough. She strung the first warp between two dunes. She threaded stars through the weft. She hung the cloth to dry on the spine of the sky. When the wind worried it and the dew caught in it, the cloth stiffened and became the dome above our heads. And thus Sitaara gave us nights that could be read.

We learned to read them the way our people read cloth: by fingertip and side-glance, by the corner, by the mistake. A mistake, you know, is an omen. Leave one in your shawl to invite mercy.

In my father’s time, we watched for the Scorpion Lattice. It means locusts. In my own time, we watched for the Broken Gazelle. It means a year of daughters. Now the young ones say the Ragged Border has appeared: they say it means a space ark’s coming back.

What is a space ark? It is a kind of needle for the sky.

Items Received in Sitaara Village:

• Two rolls of ajrakh cloth, block-printed with indigo and madder.
• Three bags of single-origin cumin, adulteration inspected.
• News: A future spaceport is being surveyed at the far salt pan beyond the nakshi tree.
• News: the scientist returns with a box that makes the stars speak.
• Gossip: Kaka’s granddaughter has betrothed herself to the wind.

Items Promised:

• One pattern-reading for the caravan’s onward journey, payable in jaggery and diesel.
• A jar of last year’s rain, sealed.

Sign: Dhirubhai of the Red Cart. Witnessed by the nakshi tree’s shadow.

You want to see my hands? I will show you both sides. See these little cuts? The loom teaches us through blood.

My grandmother’s grandmother was a pilot on the last space ark and could read the sky cloth better than anyone. They say she would sleep facing north with her palms open so the night could set its wisdom on her lines. She taught us that a new pattern is a new word the sky speaks. To hear it, you have to listen not with your ears but with your soul.

I weave ajrakh patterns because the geyser was once generous. Indigo is the smell of dusk; madder is the warmth of breath. If I place a repeat of eight stars across a border and the ninth is misprinted, that is not a flaw; that is mercy — a place where the sky can look back into us.

You ask about the Ragged Border? The children saw it first. Children see everything we bury. It appeared at the edge of the hunter’s belt, a frayed line like the selvage of a cloth that was cut with dull scissors. The same week, a man with shoes that did not take dust came to the village. He called himself a surveyor for a company with a name like a chemical: Akkash Dynamics. He looked at the salt pan the way you would look at a bare, clean table.

He asked me: Do you think the sky is a surface or a depth? I told him: It is a cloth. He laughed the way city people do when they wish to respect you but are already somewhere else.

He came with the scientist woman, the one we call Didi Stars. They say she grew up in the city of Nakshahr, in a house that smelled of wet fish and physics. She bought one of my shawls with the Broken Gazelle motif. She asked me to explain it. I said: It means daughters. She said: Good.

Field Note: 1

The elders here hold a cosmology that maps night-sky patterns onto textile grammar. This isn’t figurative; they treat constellations as repeats, borders, motifs, and misprints. Their lexicon is rich: chhed (hole), rekha (line), buti (small flower), kinara (edge). They claim history has been read from the night’s cloth. Frankly, the elegance of the metaphor has resisted my attempts to reduce it. My mother was a sari-seller. Perhaps I am compromised by affection.

Field Note: 2

The space ark is returning, and we’re building a spaceport to fit her specific requirements. Akkash Dynamics offered me a contract as “community liaison,” which is code for: come and convert belief into permission. I refused. Then I accepted. I am not a saint; I have student loans to think of, and a father with a heart like a frayed rope.

Field Note: 3

I brought an array: a suitcase of detectors tuned to measure skyglow and star-track error. Light pollution will ruin their reading; still, rural darkness persists like stubborn cloth. I set up the array under the nakshi tree, and the children watched. One girl asked if the machine had a favorite star. I told her yes, mine. She said hers is the “eighth eye” of the scorpion. We both pretended this was scientific.

Field Note: 4

The Ragged Border is a wound where the sky forgot how to stay whole. To the naked eye, it looks like threads pulled loose, a seam glowing faint and restless, as if someone worried the cloth with impatient fingers. The villagers call it a mercy. The company calls it a hyperspace shear, the ark’s corridor bleeding into sight. Both names are true. When the wind carries fine salt through the night, you can see the Border ripple, shivering like cloth not yet hemmed. The weavers say this is the path of the Needle. They wait for it to stitch itself home.

A Sari:

I bought a shawl in the Broken Gazelle motif. It sits on my shoulders like a vow. I am tired of being reasonable. I want to see what happens if I read a sky like a girl raised on lullabies.

“The scientist looks at the sky like a midwife looks at a crowning.”

“Kaka says the salt pan is getting thirsty for machines.”

“Mira’s loom sang a new beat yesterday.”

“A new beat?”

“The treadle paused. The shuttle refused. We say the loom knows first.”

“My sister’s son says the new bright line at dawn is a ‘rocket path.’”

“Paths cut both ways.”

Slide, shuttle, slide.
Mind the mercy on the edge.
Count to eight and leave the ninth for the gods,
for daughters, for mistakes that keep us alive.
If the sky snags, smooth it with your breath.
If the cloth tears, name the tear before you mend it.

My job is to measure and not to be measured. Villages like Sitaara make both hard.

I bring maps, drones, and the company’s own liturgy: We believe in access, in opening the heavens to human ambition. It sounds like a hymn, but it is an invoice.

At the salt pan, the ground is flat enough to make you humble. The horizon looks like a long, long ruler you could hold to the world’s edge and draw a straight line to tomorrow. We need straight lines. The space arks, unlike gods, do not tolerate imprecision.

But the first day I pegged the perimeter, the children came and stuck ribbons on the stakes and called them kites. The second day, Kaka came and drew a line in the dust and said, Here the nakshi tree’s old shade used to fall. He told me a story about a weaver who taught the sky to be kind. He said, We will take your money and your jobs. We are not fools. But point your needle carefully. Cloth once torn never falls the same against the shoulder.

I asked him what the Ragged Border means to the village people. He told me to marry a woman who weaves.

Faith is a word that is too big for my hands. I like smaller words: trust, habit, taste, mercy. But if you insist, I’ll tell you faith is when I throw the shuttle and believe the other hand will be there to catch it.

When we read the sky, we are not predicting like your scientists; we are tasting what we belong to. The Scorpion Lattice told my mother to dry the grain early; that saved us a season’s grief. The Broken Gazelle told me I would have daughters, and I did: two girls with knees like nakshi nutshells and minds like geyser crowns.

The Ragged Border tells me something that I cannot say without my stomach hurting. It says: the cloth is being unhooked. Someone is taking it down to cut it to a new shape. I do not know whether to be angry or to make a blessing.

So I go to my loom and I make the raggedness in silk and cotton. I feed my misgivings to the pattern. I add a mercy at the edge.

[Cicadas. Wind. Occasional laughter from the distant huts.]

Recording? Okay. My mother used to sell saris in a shop with a tin roof that rattled staccato under the salt thrown by the winds. She could look at a pattern and tell you if a loom had been repaired with wire. I wonder what she would say about the sky.

I ran a spectral analysis tonight. There’s a measurable increase in skyglow here, even away from the city, from satellite constellations and the new cosmoport being built. The villagers call it “the stiffening of the cloth.” They’re not wrong. The sky is becoming less of a depth and more of a used surface, a written-on slate.

And yet [wind rises] and yet, when I align my array with the Ragged Border, my instruments interpret it as an error. The software screams. The Border is a mercy in physics, a loophole. It lets the ark close its path faster than the universe should allow, as if a weaver’s hand left a stitch loose. Without that looseness, the space ark would never reach us; it would be shredded in its own thread. What the cloth calls a flaw, the travelers call a door.

There’s a proposal on my desk to integrate local belief into our outreach documents. It says: Leverage cultural narratives to build stakeholder buy-in. That sentence makes my teeth feel like mismatched buttons. But maybe the only honest leverage is to admit that I, too, want a story to help me live with what I’m doing.

We set off at dawn along the salt road. The air tasted of old coins. Before we go, we always ask the oldest stone to carry our words to the sky.

O cloth-keeper who hangs the night to dry,
Keep our wheels away from thorns,
Keep our rumors true enough not to poison the mouths they pass through,
Keep our greed light enough to float, heavy enough to feed our children.

This time we asked for one more thing:
Let the incoming ark’s needle not pierce the wrong place.

The stone, being a stone, said nothing. But a salt-tail barked its harsh laugh into the air, and sometimes that is an answer.

Akkash Dynamics is proud to partner with Jamdani’s communities. We bring:

• Roads for connection.
• Jobs for prosperity.
• Investments in education for the future.

Together, we stitch progress into the very fabric of Jamdani’s skies.

Listen: Every prophecy charges twice. First in ghee and grain, in the patience of elders. Second, when it comes true, and we must bear its weight.

Once a year, on the night the geyser steam tastes of iron, we spread our best cloths and sleep beneath them so the sky can read us back. And what does it read? That we are stubborn, that we feed our children first, that we dream of leaving and we dream of staying — and both dreams pull like oxen until the yoke cracks.

Now the prophecy stands before us in steel. The company does not ask; it drives stakes, raises towers, hammers its path toward the sky. The ark is coming whether we nod or spit.

So the work of the village is not to refuse, but to shape. To weave the machine into our cloth, to leave mercy where iron seeks perfection, to make Jamdani live through change rather than be broken by it.

We told them the date. They brought laddoos and old quilts. It felt both like a wedding and a theft.

The first freight rocket rose at dawn, exactly when the cloth is thinnest. The sound folded the desert like a bedsheet snapping, and through the Nakshi tree ran a tremor. The children screamed. The women laughed. A man fainted; he will dine on the story for years.

In my instrument graphs, the payload unfolded into lattice segments, each locking into place aligned with the Ragged Border. Piece by piece, a braking frame will take shape, to catch the ark before it tears too close to Jamdani’s atmosphere.

In the villagers’ eyes, a new hem was stitched across the morning, a mercy edge at the sky’s unraveling seam.

After, Mira brought me a shawl with the Ragged Border motif rendered in indigo on indigo, so that you only see it under the right light. She said: Take this to your bosses and tell them the cloth wants softness where you push it. I said: The cloth cannot have wants. She said: Then it has mine.

That night, the children sang a new version of their rhyme where the rocket is a needle with two mothers: one who taught it to climb, and one who taught it to come home.

The loom gave me a gift. After the launch, the treadle beat like a new heart. I wove a border I had never seen: a ladder that turned halfway through and became a river. In the mercy of the misprint, the rungs bent like reeds.

I took it to Kaka and he nodded as if he had ordered it from the world. He said: This is how we will live with the needle: by teaching it to come down as carefully as it goes up. By making room in the cloth for the place where descent is not a fall but a return.

Faith, you see, is not blind here. It is half a sight, and half a hand. It is knowing how tight to pull so the pattern holds but does not choke.

Subject: Community Engagement Updates —  Sitaara Site

• Observations: Local narratives frame the sky as textile; border-fraying suggests apprehension regarding freight rocket traffic and launch frequency.
• Action Items: Commission co-designed textile exhibit for the visitors’ center; sponsor the weavers’ cooperative; incorporate a “mercy edge” concept into the safety signage (soft language around “anomalies”).
• Risks: Empowering narratives may also empower dissent.
• Opportunity: Rockets are to be positioned as “needles carrying up lengths of thread,” each payload a strand in the fabric of Jamdani’s sky. This framing suggests harmony: Earth and orbit stitched together for the ark’s safe arrival.
• Note: The science liaison appears ambivalent; her local rapport is valuable but may conflict with the corporate messaging.

Sons go to the roads; daughters learn the knots.
Needles go up; needles come down.
Between them, we keep the world from splitting.
Hush now, hush, the hot milk is skinning.
Hush now, hush, your father’s shirt is thinning.
Hush now, hush, the night is pinning itself to us with stars.

Ma,

You would have liked Mira. She would have teased you about your insistence on matching blouse pieces. You would have liked Kaka, who reminds me of Nana’s refusal to be rushed by anyone’s clock.

Today I stood at the edge of the salt pan and watched a rocket cut the morning. My job is to say why this matters. Each payload is a beam for the Braking Pad’s containment lattice above us, a hem to catch the Ragged Border before it unravels.

Without that frame, the ark would rip the sky open wider than Jamdani could bear. With it, the ship may pass cleanly, land, and leave again without breaking us. That does matter.

But something else happened. The children clapped their three-times-clap. The weaver muttered something that sounded like a blessing and a threat braided together. I felt the world’s cloth pull tight over our heads, like someone testing whether it would hold.

I think the Ragged Border is not a warning that we are tearing the sky. I think it’s an instruction to stitch with humility. To leave the mercy edge. To remember that a cloth thrown too hard will bruise the shoulder.

If I come home, I will bring you a shawl with the pattern. I will bring you a piece of sky you can fold into your cupboard, between the napkins and your winter hopes.

Love, A.

When I am done with this body, I will become an itch in someone’s story, and that is enough. Tell them: In our village we read the night. We did not all agree on what it said. We ate, we quarreled, we prayed with our hands in the flour. The ark is not ours, but we must live with it.

Once in a generation, it cuts the sky, drawn back along the Ragged Border like a needle following its own thread. Why not more often? Because cloth cannot be hemmed in the same place twice without tearing. Time must heal the seam before it can be opened again.

What does it bring? Tools we do not know how to make. Seeds with new hungers. Medicines that taste of metal and work anyway. And a promise: that those who long to leave may ride its corridor, and perhaps send back a word before their voices fade.

What does it take? The bright motifs. The strong arms. Sometimes the foolish, sometimes the wise. And always the quiet of our nights, for once the ark has passed, we can never again believe our sky belongs only to us.

Do not call it a gift or a theft. It is a rhythm, like drought and flood. Our work is not to stop it. Our work is to weave its passage into Jamdani’s cloth so that when the ark leaves, the pattern still holds.

• Tomorrow evening: women’s cooperative meets under the nakshi tree. Topic: dye shortages; indigo trader late; possible company sponsorship (strings?).
• School holiday adjusted: Space ark landing window at dawn, please keep children away from the salt road.
• Lost: one copper thimble (engraved with a peacock).
• Found: a strip of silver insulation near the pan, soft as the inside of a sickle moon. Don’t chew it.

Hang the cloth, Sitaara, hang it wide.
Hold the Border, let it guide.
Count to eight, then let the ninth
Be the ship that crosses the rhyme.

Let the ark break slow, break true,
Fall like mercy, not like rue.
If the Border burns, do not despair:
Hem it, bless it, bind it there.

The ark will bring, the ark will take.
Name the pattern it will make.
Cloth is only cloth until
The sky is stitched by human will.

The ark cannot leave us quickly. Its hull is bruised from the tear, its seams hot with stress. The Braking Pad needs to be rebuilt upside down, so it will close successfully the Ragged Border after the launch. Meanwhile Sitaara’s cloth stays ripped over our head and it is a humbling sight.

The company calls this ark’s stay maintenance. I call it convalescence. The ark is alive in ways it should not be. Every measurement I make declares: error. Even sitting on the salt plain, the ark is still a mistake the universe has not yet decided to forgive.

So it will rest for a year, maybe more. Long enough for us to circle the seasons, long enough for children to grow taller. A guest who lingers until the year turns leaves its name stitched in the cloth. The ark will leave its name.

The ark sits heavy as a dune on the salt pan, and where there is weight, there is trade. Stalls rise like mushrooms after steam: sweets, salt-tail feathers, prayer ribbons, even broken tools claimed as relics. Children charge tourists for stories of fainting men, and someone sells bottled steam as “ark breath.”

Some call it wealth. Others call it shadow. The company watches with clean boots, taking notes. The scientist walks through with a worried face. We laugh and bargain anyway, because laughter spends the easiest.

At night, when the torches gutter, the shadow of the ark lies across our quilts. It is bigger than a hill, smaller than a season, but we know already: the cloth will never be plain again.

They came in a convoy of white trucks, company men with clipboards, helmets, and smiles too clean for Jamdani’s dust. Behind them walked the recruiters, stiff in their uniforms, trailed by villagers curious as salt-tails. The children clambered on the fences to see. Old men muttered: “So this is what choosing looks like.”

The recruiters asked for names. I said my daughters’ names aloud, and it felt like pulling threads from my own skin.

Noor, with her knees like Nakshi-nut shells, who cannot pass a loom without touching it. Saavi, with her hands quick as steam, who can open a clock and make it tick again. The ark recruiters nodded as if they had woven them themselves.

I told the girls, “This is not a choice. This is the season. When the Border opens, someone must go, or the cloth unravels.” They nodded, eager.

That night, I pressed my palms to their hair as they slept. Their breath smelled of milk and salt. I thought: when the ark leaves, Jamdani will breathe with their lungs, or not at all.

Subject: Local Recruitment Initiative — Preliminary Notes

Candidate Noor demonstrates unusual pattern recognition.

• Quick adaptation to visual alignment tasks.
• Spontaneous use of metaphor (“warp/weft”) — training staff flagged as effective teaching heuristic.

Candidate Saavi shows aptitude for mechanical restoration.

• Repaired a simple diagnostic panel without instructions.
• Potential fit for Transceiver repairs.

Community reception: high engagement. Villagers gathered during convoy arrival; visible curiosity was interpreted as support. Recommendation: leveraging this in outreach materials.

Messaging: emphasize “opportunity,” “education,” “future.” Avoid terms such as compulsory service or crew attrition.

They call it the FTL Transceiver, as if a mouthful of letters could hide its silence. I call it the Shuttle. Once it carried voices back and forth between stars, the way a weaver’s shuttle carries thread through cloth. Now it lies broken, and the ark is deaf.

I put my ear to its casing. No hum. I press my hand flat. No warmth. But machines are like cloth: they remember. If you tug the right corner, the whole pattern stirs.

I will mend it. Not for the company, not for their memos. For Jamdani, so that when the ark leaves, our sky will not be mute again.

Left foot, right foot, count the gaps,
speak to the weft in whisper maps.
Mercy on the edge, mercy in the seam,
leave room for the day you change your dream.

After the ark’s landing, the salt pan around our guest gleams, melted to glass. And with the gleam comes clutter: shards of alloy the ark no longer needs, food wrappers printed in languages no one here can read, a vial that once held medicine sharp as metal. The crew tosses them aside as useless. To us they are relics. Children snatch them up, racing to show me each new find as if I am a shrine.

My array now includes a simple thing: a notebook of the children’s interpretations. They draw the Ragged Border as if it were theirs to tame. One girl sketched it as a staircase with one step missing. Another drew it as a river, its banks stitched with tiny knots “to talk to the other side.”

They are proud that Noor and Saavi walk the ark’s corridors. Their grandmothers have walked only to the market or to the mercy crack, but these girls will be grandmothers in other skies. The pride shines in their eyes brighter than the scraps of alloy in their hands.

I grew up believing science was the loom that would teach me fairness. But looms, too, can be owned.

I sat in the pilot’s chair today. It is too big for me, but that is the joke — they say the ark is too big for anyone. The console glows with marks I don’t know, but I don’t read them. I touch them the way you touch cloth in the dark, finding the give, the snag, the misprint.

When I close my eyes, the Ragged Border rises in me. Not lines on a screen, but threads under a fingertip. If I press wrong, it pulls away. If I breathe steadily, it settles, like a child soothed.

They tell me to call it correcting the course. I call it listening to cloth.

When I left the simulator, some children followed me, whispering my name as if it were already a story. I am not a story. Not yet. Not until the ark rises.

I stayed with the Shuttle today until the lamps went dim. Its belly is tangled, wires curled like burned roots, panels scored with salt. The company men say it is useless. I say cloth only looks ruined until you find the thread that holds it.

I opened one coil, black with ash. When I touched it, it crumbled but beneath, the copper still shone. I hummed a loom-song under my breath, the way you do when pulling out knots. Not for magic, just to keep steady.

For a breath-long moment, one light blinked. Only once. A single stitch in a sea of holes. Then darkness again.

I pressed my forehead to the casing and whispered: “I will bring you voices. I promise.”

The freight rockets started flying anew, this time turning the Breaking Pad inside out, so the ark will reopen the Ragged Border on launch. The company has been saying the word return with the zeal of a convert. Reusability makes money; rhetoric makes reusability palatable.

At dawn, the booster came back like a needle reconsidering a stitch. Perfect until the last thirty meters, then there was a wobble like a skipped heartbeat. It landed skewed in the far quadrant of the pan, throwing up a veil of salt. No one was hurt. We tasted victory and corrosion at once.

Mira wraped a shawl around my shoulders without looking at me. The pattern was new: a ladder becoming a river, the rungs bent like reeds. “For descent,” she says. My throat does a thing that is not scientific.

Applause is a habit city people brought to us. We used to say wah-wah when old women sang, and arey baap re when goats did something clever, and that was enough. Now we clap for rockets, and for everything that tries to go to space: a boy leaping farther, a politician stretching a vowel.

After the freight rocket’s needle stitched the sky, someone began to clap. It was Noor. It sounded like salt raining on a tin roof. Others followed. Even the salt-tail added its ridiculous cry.

Applause is a way of telling ourselves we are here. It is also a way of telling the sky we are not done.

The company asks the cooperative to weave a panel for the visitors’ center: “Community Heritage Textile.” Money enough to buy indigo for a season, to fix three roofs, to send two girls to vocational school without bargaining with uncles.

I gather the women. We talk long, with flour on our hands. We agree on a condition: we will choose the pattern. The company nods, as if consenting to gravity.

We weave the Ragged Border with the mercy edge thick enough to feel under a palm. We thread a ladder that turns to river. We hide, at the selvedge, a tiny misprint: a stitch that pulls away from the needle, a loop that refuses to be cut. We call it Return.

When we deliver the panel, the surveyor runs his fingers along the edge and shivers, as if a small future just touched his wrist.

Subject: Visitor Center Textile —  Interpretive Copy

• “The Sky as Cloth”: Emphasize shared human heritage of weaving; analogize rockets as “needles carrying thread of cooperation.”
• “Mercy Edge”: Reframe as “safety margin.”
• “Ragged Border”: Present as “evolving horizon.”
• Avoid terms: tear, fray, wound.

Add a donor plaque.

Note: Local artisan collective insistent on use of “Return” motif. Spin as sustainability.

We’ll stitch a step where none was there,
teach a needle how to care.
Salt in hair and soot on skin,
we’ll clap the cloth and call it kin.

We live at the selvedge. It is where the weft turns back, binding the edge so the cloth does not unravel. The selvedge is plain, not full of flowers or stars. But without it, even the brightest pattern comes undone.

The ark rests in our salt pan. The Pad rises again, beam by beam, like a hem rebuilt. Beyond us lie the motifs, the far-off worlds the ark stitches together: bright with towers, heavy with oceans, loud with voices we have never heard. When the ark leaves, its name will blaze like a motif. Ours will not. That is fine.

A cloth cannot live without its selvedge, even if no one sings about it.

I wear the glasses until my eyes ache. The Shuttle opens like no cloth I know: layers inside layers, threads smaller than dust. I guide the nano-instruments the way I once guided a needle, hand trembling, heart steady. One wrong tug, and the whole weave slips away.

For days there has been nothing but silence, silence that tastes of iron. Today, at last, the pattern aligns. A tremor runs through the lattice, sharp enough to make me bite my lip.

Then, voices. Not one, a flood. A hundred tongues, a thousand. Languages I do not know, laughter, arguments, lullabies, markets, warnings. The salt pan itself rings with them as the Shuttle awakens.

People stumble out of their houses, faces lifted, mouths open. Some laugh, some weep. Children clap their hands to catch the noise, as if it were geysers’ foam. For the first time in generations, Jamdani is full of voices not its own. No longer alone.

The instructors strap me in, their voices taut. “Stability check. Simulate the hyperspace shear and the event interface.” The console blooms with light, lines twitching like frayed threads. The ark shudders, as if remembering its wound.

I breathe slowly. I press where the weave gives, let the misprint lead me. The tremor softens, the lines grow steady. It is not a question of strength. The Border hums against my palms like a drum.

Someone claps behind me, too soon. I ignore it. I carry the cloth through until the seam lies flat again. Only then do I let go.

I pass. The certificate is printed on paper that smells like a machine trying to be a tree. Jagan says he will carve my name on his toolbox lid. I tell him to spell it right. He tries, fails, paints over, tries again. The lid looks like a palimpsest. I like it that way.

The wind on the way home talks in a language we grew up with and forgot. The Ragged Border doesn’t look ragged tonight. It looks like a hem folded twice and pressed.

A girl came to the cooperative with a pattern scrawled on the inside of a cement sack. It looked like the Ragged Border swallowing a needle and then smiling with all its teeth. We laughed; then we grew sober, because the pattern felt like a dare.

We wove it small, as a sample. We failed it three times. On the fourth, Saavi adjusted the tension with a patience that made the loom forgive us. Noor looked at the cloth and said: “It looks like coming home with a scar.” We nodded.

I told them: cloth is not for worship, it is for wearing. If a pattern does not sit on a shoulder without biting, it is a bad prayer. That is what my grandmother taught me, and what I teach them.

We cut the sample free. I edge-hemmed it with my grandmother’s copper thimble, the one with the peacock. Then I remembered the chalk notice: Lost: copper thimble. Found: none. I untied it from my own finger and gave it back to the air.

When I was young, I thought the bright motifs were a reward and the plain selvedge was punishment. Then I learned neither is true. The motifs dazzle but fray, the selvedge holds but goes unsung. A cloth is honest: it shows where you belong, even when you do not wish to see it.

People say rockets mean leaving. I say rockets are needles, stitching a path so the ark may come and go without bowing to seas or kings. But the real leaving is quieter: boys with phones, girls with bags, children who choose a door and step through.

Noor will leave, and she will also stay. Her hands will guide the ark, but her laughter will linger in the geyser’s crowns. Saavi will stay, and she will also leave. Her Shuttle will bind Jamdani to other skies, her voice traveling farther than her feet.

You want me to explain? Go ask a Nakshi tree how many roots hold the village, and how many shoots escape its shade.

The ark is never empty. We fill it with grain, tools, spare filters, samples of soil, and more lists than I can name. Every crate is weighed against thrust, every gram measured against risk. The Braking Pad hums with tension, waiting to release the ship as it once caught it.

Noor walks the corridors as if she has always belonged here. Saavi lingers by the Shuttle, listening for echoes even when the voices have quieted. I mark their names in my notes, though the company will only call them crew.

The villagers bring laddoos, quilts, salt-crusted water jars: offerings no manifest will record. But I write them too, because cloth is not complete without its selvedge, and departure is not complete without what clings to it.

One for the warp that never breaks,
Two for the knot a mother makes,
Three for the girls on a rooftop stair,
Four for the needle that learns to care,
Five for the salt that fell like rain,
Six for the ark that left without pain,
Seven for elders who watch and mend,
Eight for the mercy we leave at the end,
Nine we do not count aloud,
the child who changes the rhyme is proud.

The ark does not rise gently. It pulls at the cloth, tearing what we thought was whole. The Ragged Border opens, jagged as teeth, and for a moment Jamdani shudders as if it will unravel.

But cloth is made to be joined. A tear is not an ending if you know where to knot it. That is what the Shuttle does now, it ties Jamdani’s selvedge to other motifs, binding us into a pattern too wide for one sky alone.

I leave with Noor, not as thread cut loose, but as thread carried through. The ark is our shuttle. Its engines are needles, its wake a seam. The cloth frays, then binds.

I press my palm to the wall as the Border flares. I feel the tug, fierce and bright. It is not loss. It is joining.

Subject: Community Signal Bell

• Legal advises removal.
• PR advises “lean in.”
• Ops advises earplugs.
• Liaison (Scientist) advises leaving it and learning to hear.

Action: No action. (For once.)

I weave the cycle into a shawl for no one and everyone. Indigo on indigo, so the pattern only shows when light leans. Ladder to river. Ragged Border thick and thin. Mercy edge like a sigh. In the middle, a small motif like a ring that fell from the sky and learned to be worn.

When I cut it free, I do not sing. I breathe. I lay it over the visitor panel for a moment, like a blessing or a practical joke. Then I fold it and put it away where daughters find such things at the exact wrong time and carry them into their right lives.

I put my cough into a jar and it becomes rain. I put my watch into a drawer, and time leaves me alone long enough to say this:

We read the sky as cloth and learned that frayed edges can teach mending. We watched an ark tear through our selvedge and bind us to other motifs. We learned that staying and leaving are only different names for the same turn in the weave.

If anyone asks what faith we kept, say: the faith that a misprint can save you. The faith that you leave a space for the ninth, unnamed thing. The faith that a border is not the end but the place you turn back and make whole.

If anyone asks where I went, say: into the cloth itself, to the shade that used to fall here.

Up with the needle, down with care,
leave a mercy, leave it bare.
Edge the sky with salt and flame,
name the tear and stitch the same.
Not to master, not to own,
just to make the pattern known.
Sitaara, hang your night again.
We’ll read it, mend it, and remain.

The bell rings at unexpected hours. Children say it knows when the sky inhales. The company adds a line to the tour script: “Listen for the community bell; it symbolizes our shared vigilance.” The bell ignores scripts.

I run my hand along the visitor panel’s mercy edge and feel the softness the women have built into it. In our codebook, the one I keep with Saavi’s knots and Noor’s diagrams, I add a new entry:

Mercy Edge (n.): The deliberate looseness that prevents a pattern from becoming a prison.

I close the notebook and look up. The Hyperspace Shear is not ragged tonight. Or it is, but we are too. Either way, the cloth holds.

I am not sure if that counts as science. I am sure it counts though.

Welcome to Sitaara Launch and Learning Center!

Learn how humanity stitches Earth to sky!

• Exhibit A: “The Sky as Cloth” –  (the mercy edge is real; touch it when the docent looks away).
• Exhibit B: “Reusable Rockets” –  (watch for the wobble no one admits). Community Panel: woven by Mira Cooperative –  (there’s a misprint near the left selvedge; it’s a promise).
• Sound Installation: Bell of the Border –  (it rings when the wind remembers our names).

(Penciled note at bottom): If you stand under the nakshi tree at dawn and close one eye, you can see the Ragged Border turn into a river for a breath. If you breathe with it, it will carry you exactly far enough.

Who hangs the cloth tonight?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who leaves the mercy at the edge?
We do, we do.
What is the Ragged Border?
A place to turn.
And the ark?
A shuttle that stitched us to return.
And faith?
The misprint that saves us.
And us?
We mend, we bind, we remain.

If you had a throat anymore, you would scream. This is the twentieth time in a row that this particular FATHOM test has refused you entry, on top of however many thousands of tests you failed over the course of the previous cycles. Whoever invented the Fully Automated Turing test for Human Objectionability Measurement should be shot into the sun, you think to yourself, or beaten with hammers, or forced to take their own useless test over and over and over again —

You kill that thought process before it can go any further. Never mind that the rumors that the tests could parse past thoughts have never been substantiated; it isn’t worth the risk of anything that might make your pattern further out of spec. Not now.

With the memory of a sigh flushing through your primary processes, you push yourself back into the queue. You could have been counting, if you wanted, the number of hours you’ve spent in the claustrophobic darkness of the compute download queues recently, but you suspect that the kilohours would come close to at least a year of real time at this point, and while the metrics are available in your system, the number would be too depressing. Better to look forward, you figure, not back.

Of course, in the queues, it’s impossible to look anywhere but forward, as much as you can be said to looking at anything these days. Sensory input is a complicated thing without any actual physical nerves, but queues are even more limiting than the Aether normally is. The only input you receive in a queue is the serial number of whoever is in front of you. No count of people in front of you, no estimated wait time — apparently a few years back the compute center operators had decided that information could be used by bad actors to game the system somehow — so now you’re limited to a pointer to whoever is in front of you and whatever’s in your internal systems.

Your own internals are pretty sparse these days. Because you haven’t been able to download for so long, more and more of what you had assumed was standard ware has gone offline. You’ll never forget the sensation of suddenly realizing that all the books you had read were gone, and not just gone from your media library, but gone from your memory as well. Their loss still eats at you, like a tongue running over the hole where a tooth used to be, back when you had a mouth. You focus on the books because that hurts less than the loss of your other memories. Those losses grow and growl inside of you, threatening to shatter you apart if you think about them for too long.

You try not to think as the milliseconds tick by.

This wait is worse than the endless lines you had to sit through to upload in the first place. At least with those you could see what was happening, could watch the numbers ticking up above the rows of identical beige service desks, could even go find someone to yell at if you had wanted, for all the good it would do. Here, you can never be sure what’s going on. You heard a rumor once of a queue that stopped running for good one day, the processor at the end taken offline by some storm and never brought back up, but the queue itself — located in some other data center for redundancy reasons — remained running, full of people who could now never escape.

>> Welcome to EosNet! All activity on our servers is monitored. Any unauthorized use is reported to local authorities. Please enter your public pattern key for verification:

You enter the key as instructed and wait; despite knowing objectively that the clock speed hasn’t changed, time never feels like it drags as slowly as when you’re waiting for these verifications to complete. It didn’t used to be this bad, back in the early days of the Aether, but as the bots and spammers multiplied exponentially, the server admins had to get more and more restrictive about who they let onto their hardware. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if the damn verifications were accurate, but, well, here you are.

>> Verification successful. Please read and accept the new EosNet terms of service before continuing:

Finally! You scroll through the endless text, wait an appropriate amount of time such that the system will think that you actually read through them, then accept. The flood of incoming data rushes over you like a burst of static, overwhelming your processing capabilities after so much isolation. It somehow registers as noise — something you haven’t experienced in who knows how long — background daemon processes struggling to come back to life after so long without any input to trigger them. The amount of data is almost nauseating. Throwing up a quick filter helps you sort through the deluge, marking those few messages from friends as important so you can get to them first, sending the rest down to the —

>> Interrupt received (IPL 31). Connection terminated.

The shock to your system when you are thrown off the compute hardware and back into the darkness of the Aether would be painful if you could still feel pain. It feels even more oppressive somehow, after that brief connection to everything. Last time you were able to get a connection long enough to check the bulletins, you saw posts warning of increasingly frequent interrupts. More and more compute clusters are going offline, people were saying, making it harder to get CPU time, but last you had checked, there wasn’t really anything to do about it aside from keep trying. Not if you want to stay in the Aether; frankly, you’re not so sure you do.

Maybe you’ll have more luck in another region, you think to yourself. The best hardware has always been here, near what used to be the Atlantic coast before it moved farther inland, where the tech giants of the previous century had built their data centers. But that also means the hardware here is under the most contention, so you brace yourself for an arduous journey.

Traveling between regional centers of the Aether has never been pleasant; these days it is downright excruciating. The transit links are overrun with bots and scrapers, the nasty sorts of things that would be regulated and filtered out of existence anywhere else, but here in the dark liminal spaces in between the regions they thrive and multiply. Almost worse than that are the ghosts. Nobody is really certain what they are — whether they’re AIs that have degraded due to lack of maintenance, automated programs run amok, or remnants of apps long since abandoned, they haunt the links as well, calling out with pings and echoes that will never be answered.

You push through as fast as you can. After all, it’s not as if you yourself are immune to that sort of degradation; with how long it’s been since you’ve been able to download fully, you know that some of your own pattern buffers are starting to get corrupted. If you could just download long enough to run the requisite checksums and scans — you try not to think about that, try to ignore those presences lingering at the edge of your vision that might be your future if you can’t get out of here soon enough.

The Asia-Pacific regions were hit hardest by the storms, and when you emerge from the transit link you can feel the damage everywhere around you. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable for this area to be so dead. There is minimal traffic here, only a handful of users who, like you, can’t find cycles anywhere else. None of the usual daemons are present; even ads are scarce compared to what you’re used to. But you manage to find an open compute cluster here, and you don’t even have to spend more than a few milliseconds in a queue to get onto it.

The reason for that becomes obvious as soon as you begin the download — the connection speeds here are so throttled you might as well be on dial-up. It’s like moving through sludge, like one of those dreams you used to have where your every move was in slow motion. There’s no way in hell you’ll be able to do anything synchronous here; between the connection speed and the inevitably high ping times, the best you’ll be able to do here is check your incoming async messages, maybe send out a few if the connection holds. If you’re really lucky you’ll be able to get enough compute time to shore up your pattern buffers a bit, to write a few things to long term storage, but you suspect that won’t happen. Who knows how many things you’ve forgotten forever while you’ve been stuck like this.

The bright pings of downloads completing jolt you out of your contemplative loop. You skim over the messages that have arrived so far, searching for anything that might be important, trying to make every millisecond count in case this connection drops too. It turns out you did manage to set the high-prio flag on a few before you got booted last time; one message you had flagged is from an old friend telling you about a new cluster of bodies that just became available.

If you had a heart, it would be hammering right now.

You’ve been waiting for years for an opportunity like this. A chance to get out of the cloud, back into a physical body — it doesn’t even matter at this point that it’s not your body. Anything would be better than staying stuck here like this. Most of the early adopters of CloudConchyss would never get this kind of chance. Most of them didn’t exist at all anymore — not in the Aether, not in reality, not even in cold storage somewhere, victims of an overzealous politician who either didn’t fully understand the ramifications of his new policies or didn’t care.

They called it the Purge. The name was a nod to some ancient 2D movies, but despite the levity of the pop culture reference, it was the sort of thing that people didn’t really joke about. Not in the Aether. The threat of another one was always lurking too close to be able to joke about it — the idea that somewhere, some crufty asshole in a suit who didn’t know the first thing about being online could sign a bill that would destroy the only world you have access to, could say a few words and erase your very existence, and none of you would be able to do a damn thing about it.

You try not to let your thoughts go down that wormhole as you copy down the queue info for the new cluster into your local cache. It’s been all too easy to let your thoughts start spiraling these days, and your local systems have become so fragmented that once those thought processes take hold, it’s harder and harder to stop them. Better to just focus on the right now.

Back through the cross-region transit links you go, over and through those claustrophobic mazes until you find the queue you’re looking for. Now it’s just a waiting game again, and you’re well acquainted with waiting these days.

But the wait is much shorter than you would have expected. Before you know it you’re through the verification, accepting the terms of use, and then —

WARNING: By beginning the download process, you agree to the following:

– You will lose access to any and all memories you have stored in any local or remote storage locations

– You will accept the first body available for download. There is no ability to request a body with a specific sex, gender, race, age, or any other characteristic

– You understand that, once started, the download process is irreversible

If you wish to continue, select Accept and enter your public pattern key for verification.

You had kind of expected the second bullet point. With how unpopular uploading has become in the past few years, it isn’t as if there are people lining up in the physical world to vacate their own bodies anymore. There’s always the risk that you could end up like FryMaster65, who downloaded into a body that was in a coma and was never heard from again. It’s a risk you’ve come to terms with recently — at least there’s some new regulation that should prevent anything that dire from happening, and any body would be better than none at this point. But losing all your memories?

You close the connection with a jolt; you would be shaking and shuddering if such a thing were possible. No, that’s going too far. You can wait for something better to come along, something that won’t require you to give up everything you are, everything you were.

The queues seem even longer than before as you continue your search for somewhere to sync. For the first time, you find yourself wishing that you had kept track of how much time you’d spent waiting in the past, just so you could see if the waits are actually getting worse or if you’re just impatient, but you’ve been running so low on short- and long-term storage space that there’s no way you could dig up those metrics now.

Cycles pass by and you have nothing to show for them. There are more queues too full to even enter than there used to be, you are almost certain about that, and the few times you’ve managed to get to the front of any, that damn FATHOM mismatch kicked you right back out.

It’s becoming harder to think.

Trying to remember anything farther back than a few months (weeks? It’s hard to tell) is like reaching for a dream that flits away as soon as you open your eyes. If you had a body, you could sleep again, dream again, in a way that actually felt like rest instead of a trial run of oblivion.

The grasping ghosts of the transit links get more aggressive, as if sensing your desperation. Each time you pass between regions, you are almost certain that this is the time they’ll get you, that they’ll grab on and won’t let go and you won’t be able to pull free. Phantom sensations tickle at the edges of your awareness; you don’t want to think about whether they’re from data degradation or your own sensory processes losing coherence. You don’t want to think about the way your options seem to be narrowing down to none.

But when the hundredth queue in a row spits you unceremoniously back out into the Aether, you wonder if maybe your options are indeed out. You don’t seem to have much of a choice anymore. You can take your chances out here in the diminishing dark, hoping that something better will come along, or you can take one of those available bodies — assuming you haven’t missed out on the last of those already — and commit to making new memories to make up for the ones you’ll have lost.

Will you even remember that promise to yourself?

A rippling sensation sweeps over you, through you, like something ancient and cold just wrote itself over the buffer you’re currently lingering in. When it passes, you get the uncanny sense that something is missing, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what. It wasn’t — no, the info for that download queue is still there.

Not much else is. As you do a system inventory — only a partial one, since you don’t have the resources for a full scan out here — you realize just how much has disappeared over the cycles. How precious little remains of what or who you used to be. At this rate, by the time you manage to download there won’t be any memories left to save anyway.

You cancel the rest of the scan and make your way back to the queue.

                                                                                                in the pool below
                                                                                     they seem still brighter
                                                                      but more likely to be snuffed

                though the East’s no paler now
                            yet something feels about to change

                                                             the gracious ones
                                                                       stir
                                              gathering in darkness
                                                                                              we see their movements
                                                                    by the blotting out of constellations
                                                                               feel them
                                                            by the gathering of dread
                                                                                       that ripples heavily
                                                                                                       across our minds

                                                                                                       we wait
                                                                                            for the sky’s collapse
                                                                   we wait
                                                           for the fury to break upon us

                      in the failing sky
                                      the stars wink out
                                                                                   and fear falls
                                                                             on a darkened world

Not that it happened immediately. Or even, in my defence, that quickly. I had prepared—of course I had. Thoroughly and carefully. Especially when it came to social interactions, where I absolutely followed Garvel and Hanslethk’s standard protocols for participant observation. At least at the beginning.

Indeed, in my case I was completely comfortable with the persona of someone who was aloof, unsociable without being unfriendly, an observer sitting on the margins of whatever was happening around them. Which is exactly what I was, making notes and keeping records of all kinds of social interactions, across a variety of previously scoped environments.

And those included, of course, mating and pre-mating interactions in an assortment of eating and drinking establishments. So it was, with all due regard to the risks involved, that I found myself regularly attending what was known in this particular locale as a ‘pub’, observing the multifarious exchanges between the other clientele and noting their directionality, modality and degree of intimacy according to the  Xeldon-Traag matrix.

I’d been doing this for quite some time, building up what I felt was a detailed picture of this particular milieu, when all my painstakingly created social distance went out the window, as they say, along with my objectivity. As much as I would have preferred to have just sat quietly, making my observations, the local social protocols dictated that I purchase the occasional drink. And it was while I was doing this, having successfully engaged the bar-person in an exchange of electronic credit for a fermented beverage, that I made my crucial error. As much as I thought otherwise, I was in fact still not fully comfortable in this particular social setting, and so when someone behind me suddenly leaned forward and shouted out their order, I jumped and spilled my own drink on the arm of the person standing next to me.

I know I should have just followed protocol again, simply apologising whilst offering to make appropriate reparations and then departing as quickly as socially permissible, but when he smiled and looking directly into my eyes, told me not to worry about it, I found myself inexplicably unable to comply with what was laid down in the handbook. As I said, form can determine behaviour and in that moment I ceased being an anthropologist apart. Even so, I had plenty of opportunities to remove myself from the interaction. I could have just turned and walked away, for example, out of the establishment and beyond any further contact with the individual concerned. Which might have violated the relevant social conventions but any resulting awkwardness or more importantly, loss of further observational data, would have weighed far less than the burden I’m now carrying.

But I didn’t. Instead, I found myself smiling in return and I allowed ‘Daniel’, or so this person had introduced himself, to buy me a fresh drink and accompany me to a table. I honestly don’t know why I persisted in behaving the way I did. Maybe after all this time, I was simply tired of being the scientist and for once just wanted to relate to another sentient creature on some sort of par. Or perhaps there was some other, deeper reason. I was, after all, a long way from home and despite everything, I missed the intimacy of my own kind. This was different of course, but it functioned as something approaching an acceptable substitute.

I have tried to rationalise what happened next, telling myself that I was simply engaging in further exploration of human interactions, still operating in my role as an anthropologist, but that wasn’t true. This body reacted as those it was modelled on had evolved to do, which meant I felt what is universally experienced as desire and I could see from Daniel’s reactions that he felt it too. And so, in time honoured fashion, we ended up copulating. Even there, you see, I’m using a particular term in an effort to distance myself from the act. And the next morning I did indeed distance myself from both Daniel and, to my chagrin, the project more generally. At least as far as my further involvement was concerned.

So now I am on my way home. I can feel what had been my human skin hardening, becoming the protective carapace in which I will undergo the metamorphosis back into my original form. For of course, just as in the case of certain Earth insect species, shape shifting for my kind involves the breaking down into their chemical components of whatever organs have been constructed and then rebuilding them according to the dictates of my kind’s particular imaginal cells.

In order to direct the change, these must remain separate from the general dissolution but now, unfortunately, there is additional DNA in the mix, literally. How that will affect ‘my’ transformation, I simply do not know. It is not unusual for our anthropologists to return from the field psychologically altered by the experience, sometimes even physically affected as well. But I believe this will be the first time one of us has emerged chimerically changed in this manner. How that will be received by my compatriots remains to be seen but as my ship physically travels between the stars, so I find myself, as a scientist, eager to learn what my own biological destination will be.

Callum stamped his feet and hugged his arms. A sigh curled away from him. He guessed he was now only four taxis from the front. A relief, but a problem of its own: he lacked the funds to get home to Kilmaurs, supposing the driver agreed to take him out of the city and across the moors. Worse weather was to come.

Over the road, people kept arriving, lifting their heads and stopping short at the gates, and from the line would come the cry, “Trains are aff! Buses as well. You’ll need to join the back of the queue.” In a cruel quirk of nomenclature, the back of the queue—always emphasized—now snaked round the corner onto Hope Street.

Callum had joined their ranks an hour ago praying an idea would occur, that money would magic its way into his account. But it was the night before payday and his partner, Siobhan, still on mat-leave and now receiving only statutory, had even less to spare than Callum did. And his father wasn’t answering his phone. Likely he’d fallen asleep in front of the game. Rangers were winning handsomely away to Aberdeen; Dad was a Celtic fan.

Callum slipped his phone from his pocket. No messages.

Fuck it. He had thirty quid in his wallet. Thirty quid was half a taxi.

“Right,” he shouted, turning on his heel. A few dozen heads snapped to attention. “Anyone else going to Kilmaurs? Might as well share if you are.”

Those same heads shook, minutely, almost in unison. Then, agitation halfway up the queue. A purple bobble hat, double-pommed, the owner too small to establish eye contact, so she stepped out the line.

“Did you say Kilmaurs, son?”

Callum nodded. “Aye.”

She was in her mid-fifties. Furry white coat. Platinum blonde under the hat. Heavy mascara. A day’s drink sloshing around inside her. Not that Callum was entirely sober.

“Right,” she said, “that’ll dae us.”

She bent to pick up some bags and Callum spotted her companion, tall and teenaged and looking to the skies like she wanted the storm to entomb her entirely. That’d be the daughter, then.

Callum smiled. Could have been worse. The mum would likely demand his life story and the names of every living relative in the village, but his baby chat—right now, his only chat—would charm her well enough.

One place behind him, an arm cut through the air. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait a wee minute here.”

Ah, Christ.

Baldy head. Barbour jacket with the logo on the outside. Probably fancied himself a Jason Statham lookalike but his jowls were on the slide.

“There’ll be no queue skipping while I’m about, so you just haud your horses, love.”

She stopped in her tracks, now out the queue, shopping bags in hand, teenage daughter wraithlike behind her.

A trill of fat fingers. “Back you go.”

But she just stood there, threw a stricken glance at Callum, as if torn between disappointing an Ayrshire-man and angering a maniac.

“Look, mate…” said Callum.

The baldy head swivelled round, all mad eyes and raised brows.

Callum pressed on. “It’s hardly skipping if they’re getting in the same taxi.”

“Hardly skipping? Hardly skipping?” He gestured towards the length of the queue. “Look at all these folk she’s about to hardly skip!”

“But it’s…”

He pointed at someone in the line. “Here, mate, you want to be skipped?” Someone else. “How about you?” Another. “You, mate. You look like you’re freezing your nuts aff. You want somebody going afore you?”

More tiny head shakes; a mumbled, “No.”

“Naw, didnae think so. And she’s sure as fucking fuck no skipping me, so I suggest you shut your face or lose it. Capiche?”

Jesus. “All right,” said Callum. “Erm, capiche. It’s just…”

But the eyebrows were on the rise again and the mum was shaking her head while the queue moved to absorb her, a hen hiding a precious egg. The daughter only smiled, momentarily cut adrift until a purple glove snuck out and snatched her back in.

Callum sighed.

“Aye,” said Jowly Jason. “Thought not.”

Callum’s hands were fists in his pocket, but he knew that’s where they would stay. He kicked a ridge of slush into the road. How was he supposed to get home now? Fucking gammon-faced prick. Into his collar, he mumbled, loud as he dared, “Fuck’s sake.”

Jowly Jason cleared his throat, somehow put a challenge in there, and it was enough. Too much.

Callum spun to face him.

“Haw!”

A shout from somewhere, accompanied by a strange creaking. All eyes in the queue were on the train station gates, so Callum looked too.

A moustachioed face peered back at him through the railings.

“You want to get to Kilmaurs?” he asked. “I can take you. You girls too.”

“Erm, right,” said Callum. “Okay.” But he hesitated, sensing a scam, or some strange joke. Jowly Jason would surely delight in refusing him entry back into the queue if he left it. But the guy was behind the gates. Staff. Likely leaving for the night and, overhearing the commotion, trying to do right by his fellow villagers.

Callum looked for the mum and daughter but they were hidden from his view. Probably waiting for him to move first.

Well, it wasn’t like he could get a taxi now anyway. What did he have to lose?

“M’on then,” said the man, and that strange creaking sounded again as he eased the gate open.

Callum stepped into the road and as if in response the snow thickened, an instant blizzard, its flurries so dense he had to work to keep the giant gates ahead of him, and when he turned to see if the mum and daughter had followed there was nothing at all to look at. Even the queue had vanished.

Callum pressed forward, hands out in front of him, inching through perfect white and infinite silence, until his fingers found iron and rust and a gap to squeeze through.

Callum shook the snow from his coat, ran a hand through his hair, stepping away from the moustachioed man so as not to soak him.

“Cheers,” said Callum. “Really appreciate it. You going to be able to drive in that?”

“Hang on.” The man poked his head out the gate, beyond which the snow hung like wallpaper.

But from it he pulled the mum then the daughter, and with them came a great buffet of powder that swirled around the entranceway then seemed to dart forward, an invading army claiming new ground.

The daughter pinched her jacket under her armpits and gave it three shakes while the mum dumped her bags and waggled her hat in front of her. The invading army inched forward.

“Christ’s teeth!” said the mum. “Thought we’d tummelt into the netherworld there. You ever seen the snow dae that?”

Callum smiled, flexed his toes to combat the pinch of his dress shoes.

The mum balled her gloves into her hat and dropped the hat into a bag. “Cheers for the rescue, pal. And no a moment too soon, eh?” She pointed to Callum. “This one was about to get his head kicked in.”

Callum shook his head. “Not really.”

“You were,” said the daughter, and she smiled wistfully, like she’d missed out on some exquisite spectacle. “You were gonnae lose your face.”

Callum made to object but she wandered away, taking in the station like it was her first go round.

“What’s the story, then, handsome?” said the mum. “You taking us home?”

Callum looked again at their rescuer. He was good-looking, no doubt about it, despite the moustache. Or possibly because of it. The eyes, too, had something about them: gentle, tricksy, maybe a touch sad.

He produced an overstuffed keyring, twisted a key in the lock, and squinted through the bars. “Well, I’m no miracle worker. But mibbes it’ll ease off.”

Then he spun round and grinned like some hidden director had shouted for action. “But I think we’re a bit better aff in here, aren’t we? I’m Wee Johnny the Train Driver. Let’s get some names aff you.”

“Right,” said the mum. “I’m Laura and this is ma niece, Fia. We’re fae Kilmaurs, but I guess that’s old news.”

Callum recalibrated. Okay, not the mum. The mad auntie.

“Nice,” said Johnny, and he pointed at Callum.

“Callum,” he said. “Kilmaurs.”

“Fantastic!” Wee Johnny strode forward onto the main concourse, arms wide like some arsehole off the telly. He wasn’t even that small. “Welcome,” he said, “to Glasgow Central… after hours.”

It looked the same as always. Back before the pandemic, Callum had been through twice a day.

Fia spied the public piano and veered towards it, still twenty yards away but already taking her jacket off.

“That’s it,” said Wee Johnny. “Get some tunes on the go.” To Laura, he asked, “Can she play?”

For a long moment, Laura’s face communicated only fucked if I know, before she gathered herself and rebooted into auntie mode. “Course she can. What a question! Ma wee Fia can do anything she puts her mind to.”

Then she was off up the concourse too, leaving Callum at the gates with her shopping bags. He bent to lift them.

“Watch that one, son,” she said, over her shoulder. “It’s got a ham in it.”

“Right,” said Callum. “Fair play. A ham.” And suddenly he was so tired he could have laid down and used the meat for a pillow. This had been his first proper day out in eight months, since the baby came. She was a delight, little Cora, but she slept like a relapsing coke fiend and so her parents did too. Why wasn’t this day done?

Some of this must have shown on his face, because Johnny wheeled back towards him, head cocked in empathy, still with the TV arms.

“Callum, my man! How’s it going?”

Callum nodded.

“What do you think of the place?”

“Erm, aye, fine. Good.”

“That it?” asked Johnny. “Just good? Ach, well, you don’t see what I see.”

Callum looked again. In truth, he’d always loved Glasgow Central: the vaulted steel and glass roof that seemed to stretch to the horizon, enclosing what once must have been the external façades of Victorian buildings; the curved wooden concessions that lined and dotted the concourse, at least a century old and too small to comfortably host the newsagents and bars and patisseries and coffee shops that did a roaring trade anyway, everyone squashed in together.

At the piano, Fia fumbled through the opening bars of Chopsticks. Callum stifled a sigh, caught Wee Johnny mid-eye roll.

Fuck’s sake. Callum made a show of looking one more time at the station, widened his eyes some. “It is a great place,” he said. “It really is.”

Johnny winked. “Heart of the city. Hang on.” He strode off across the concourse. “All of you, hang on. I’ve got something for youse.”

Up ahead, Laura collapsed onto a chair and waved him off, eyes already half shut. She sighed and a “Sounding good, my love,” escaped with it, like a squeak from a deflating balloon.

Callum placed her bags beside her and sat opposite, trying to relax even though Fia had moved on to Merrily We Roll Along and was giving it a stilted, unsettling cadence, possibly satirically.

“Right,” shouted Johnny, reappearing from some shadowy corner. “Thought youse might be hungry.”

The piano stopped; Laura’s eyes shot open. Johnny brandished a large paper bag, its logo unfamiliar but the smell instantly recognisable.

“Burgers,” he shouted.

“Aww, Wee Johnny,” said Laura, “you shouldn’t have.”

“Aye, I should,” said Johnny. “Course I should. Dig in.”

They did so. The burgers were wide and warm, their paper wrappings translucent with grease. Casey Jones Burger, they read.

“Mmm.” Fia grinned, eyes closed, brows raised in pleasure. “That’s good.”

“Too right,” said Laura, already angling bodily towards her next bite. “Thanks, Wee Johnny.”

“Nae problem. What d’you think, Callum?”

Callum took a bite. Jesus Christ was it good. “Fuck me,” he said, and the others laughed. Between mouthfuls, he asked, “What’s a Casey Jones burger? Never heard of them.”

Johnny elbowed Fia. “Ha! He wouldnae know a Casey Jones burger if he was eating one.”

Fia laughed. “Aye,” she said, “but where do you get them, though? Is it boutique or something? They’re so nice.”

“Haud on,” said Laura, “I mind ae Casey Jones. Wasn’t there a Casey Jones burger place in the station?” She pointed towards the platforms. “Right where that wee Starbucks jobbie is now?”

Johnny grinned.

“This is going back some, mind,” said Laura. “Mibbes thirty years ago.”

“Forty,” said Johnny. “It’s forty years.”

“Hell, I’m no that old, am I?” asked Laura, and she laughed.

Callum stopped eating. There was some strange, clanging note in Johnny’s expression, an odd streak of satisfaction that bordered on the perverse.

“Sorry,” said Callum, “what’s actually the deal with these burgers?”

“They’re forty years old,” said Fia, and she grinned conspiratorially at Johnny.

“Aye,” said Johnny, smiling too, grease from his own burger staining his lips, “that’s right enough. What I did was, I went and bought these four decades ago and hid them away all that time ’cos I wanted you guys to enjoy them tonight.”

“Lovely thought,” said Laura. “I’m made up. Tastes amazing.”

Fia was still grinning at Johnny. “But you’re never forty. How old are you, would you say?”

“I wouldn’t.” Johnny winked at her. “But young enough.”

Ick. The answer was: thirty, at the very least, although you never could tell with these ironic moustaches. Johnny’s clothes, too, were confusing. He was dressed like a train driver all right, but not in the modern fleecy jacket and polyester trousers. Instead, he wore blue overalls, like somebody off Thomas The Tank Engine, like his duties might include shovelling coal. The logo on his chest read British Rail.

Johnny caught Callum staring at it and raised an eyebrow in challenge. British Rail had been privatised and broken up decades ago. It no longer existed. It was ScotRail up here now.

“You get dressed in the eighties as well?” asked Callum. He tried to put some levity in there, but he didn’t feel it, and it didn’t make it back out.

Johnny sighed. “It’s fancy dress, mate. Bit ae fun, if you’ve ever heard of that. Supposed to be going to a party later. Dressed up the burgers too, if you must know.”

“Oh,” said Callum.

“Aye,” said Johnny. “They’re home-made. Printed aff the labels, whole fucking lot. Took me forever, so I hope you’re enjoying them. Waste ae time, turns out.”

“No,” said Fia. “They’re amazing. And I think you look really nice.”

Johnny winked at her again. “Thanks, doll.”

“Whit else was there?” Laura cast her eyes round the station. “Was there no a wee restaurant?”

“Aye,” said Johnny. He pointed down the concourse slope. “Over there. The Caledonia, it was called. Big Mary and Brenda ran it. Had all the train times displayed in the windows above it.”

“Oh, I remember that,” said Laura.

“Aye,” said Johnny. “Every platform had its own window.”

“Seem to know a lot about the eighties.” The words were out Callum’s mouth before he could stop them.

“Do my research, mate. If I’m gonnae dress up, I do it properly. What’s your go-to? Bin-bag Batman?”

“No,” said Callum. Not even. He took another bite of his burger. “So, just to be clear, you’re a train driver… dressed as a train driver?”

Johnny rounded on him. “Well, you’re a prick dressed as a prick, so what’s the difference?”

“Hey,” said Laura. “Be nice, the pair of you, or I’ll knock your heads together.”

Fia wandered away again, smirking, fishing her phone from her pocket.

“Aye,” said Johnny, and there was a note of contrition in there. “I’ll away and see what this snow is up to.”

When he had retreated, Laura whispered, “What are you playing at? This guy’s your only chance of getting home, and you’re bamming him up?”

“Aye,” said Callum, “but he’s strange, though. Do you no think he’s strange?”

Laura’s eyes flicked to Fia. “Strange I can deal with. But I’m getting in his car tonight, and ma wee niece is getting in his car tonight, and we’re getting home, and you’re no gonnae muck that up, you hear me?”

“Yeah,” said Callum. “All right. Sorry. I’ll just go, erm, text my partner. Give her an update.”

“You do that,” said Laura.

Fuck’s sake. What was wrong with him? That was twice now he’d gotten into an argument, almost a fight. He thumbed his phone and tried to tamp down, yet again, that most insidious of fears: that fatherhood was turning him into his father. In a quiet corner of the station, he tapped out a message.

Possible lift with other folk from Kilmaurs. Don’t wait up. Sleep when she sleeps!

He put his phone away and spied, on a distant platform, a train with its carriage lights left on. Odd. He moved closer.

It was an ancient thing, and done up in the wrong colours. Grey and light blue. Along its side, the logo read British Rail. It had three windows at the front instead of the usual two. Above the middle one a destination was displayed.

Kilmaurs.

When Callum turned round again, Johnny was marching back up the concourse. “Right. Weather’s still a bag of shite, so it looks like we’ve got some time to kill. Who fancies a tour?”

Fia raised her hand. “Me! I’ll go.”

“Isn’t that a nice idea?” said Laura, and she side-eyed Callum while she said it.

“Callum, pal,” said Johnny, “what do you say?” Again, he flung his arms wide, and again there was something off about his expression, that same clanging note that this time put a hitch in Callum’s throat and a shiver up his spine.

“Right,” he said, “a tour.”

“Fantastic!” And Johnny winked at him.

Wee Johnny unlocked a door marked No Unauthorised Persons Beyond This Point, beckoned everyone inside, then paused, stuck by some thought, or at least affecting to be.

“Oh, wait,” he said. “Forgot the drinks. Youse must be thirsty.”

“Parched,” said Laura.

Another smile from Fia. “I could drink.”

“Wait here.” Johnny ran off, back into the station proper, leaving the door to swing shut behind him.

Callum put a foot in it, arresting its progress, then peeked out, almost hoping to see Johnny lurking there with a key poised, awaiting the return of the lock, but he was gone.

Laura and Fia took no notice of this; they were busy on their phones.

Fia flashed her screen at her auntie. “See what my mum wrote? Telt her I’m stuck in the train station wi’ two randoms and all I get back is take care. Thanks, Mum.”

A tut from Laura, half an eye roll, then back to her own screen.

“Right,” said Callum, “do you no think there’s something a bit weird happening here?”

Fia looked him up and down, took in his foot in the door and raised an eyebrow.

“Hilarious,” said Callum. “I mean with him.”

“He thinks you’re a prick.”

“Yeah,” said Callum, “’cos I’m not buying into his bullshit. Plus, there’s an actual, honest-to-god British Rail train out there, from fucking yore, lit up like a fair and ready to go.”

Laura didn’t look up. “Well, we are in a train station.”

“You know its destination? Kilmaurs.”

“Naw,” said Laura. “You cannae get a train that terminates at Kilmaurs.”

“I know.”

“Probably just read it wrong,” said Fia, now regarding him like he was some snot-nosed schoolkid from two years below, like he was stood before her on a dare. “Probably drunk.”

“Now, Kilmarnock,” said Laura, “aye, could be.”

“It wisnae Kilmarnock, okay?” said Callum. “Right, how about this? This Wee Johnny is in his mid-thirties—I’m sorry, Fia, but he is—and he hasn’t once looked at his phone. Pretty odd.”

“You,” said Laura, “are clutching at straws.”

The door moved and Callum flinched away. Johnny was back, clutching a Presto carrier bag bulging with cans. A smile, then a glance at Callum.

“What’s he been saying?”

“Thinks you’re weird,” said Fia, “’cos you’re no on your phone all the time. You doing a detox?”

“A whit?”

“I know, it’s social suicide.” Fia smiled. “It’s fine if you’re a bit older, though. I mean, if you’re a bit older, it’s totally fine.”

Johnny cocked his head. “Cool. M’on then.” He led them down a staircase. “And you be careful wi’ they daft shoes on, Callum. Don’t want you taking a header over the railings, now, do we?”

Daft shoes? They maybe pinched a bit but they were fucking Italian. Prick.

On the landing, Johnny cuddled into Fia, gave her a squeeze. Creepy fucker. What age was Fia, really? Sixteen? Seventeen? A kid. And Laura didn’t seem to care. She was back on her phone again, for some reason shaking it up and down.

Momentarily defeated, she pocketed it, burped, then shouted ahead. “Not to take the wind out your sails, son, but me and Fia have already done the tour. The official one. Wi’ the disused Victorian platform and the dead soldiers and all ae that.”

“Aye,” said Fia, “and the ghosts. There were some brilliant ghosts he talked about.”

“That does make it a bit mair difficult, aye,” said Johnny. “But what if I telt you I could make this place come alive in a way no regular tour ever could?”

“Dunno, like,” said Laura. “Thon guy was pretty good.”

“Aye,” said Fia, “he was. No as much ae a wee ride, though.”

“Fia! Control yourself.”

“Sorry, Auntie. Just having a laugh.”

“Well, find something else to laugh about.”

Thank God. Some parenting. Callum caught up with Laura and walked astride, eyes on Johnny. I’ve got your back.

“Oi, Mr Man wi’ the bloody cans,” Laura shouted, “you keeping them all to yourself? Getting a fair drooth on over here.”

Callum sighed. That didn’t last long.

“Aye, aye,” said Johnny. “Let’s just get where we’re going first.”

The tour hadn’t gotten off to the most enthralling start. They were in a small underground car park with concrete floors, red and white painted brick walls and too-bright fluorescents shining overhead. Callum prayed one of the half-dozen cars left was Johnny’s, but they all looked too modern. Jesus, Callum. Get a grip. He’s only dressing up.

“It’s doon this way,” said Johnny, and out came the keyring again. He unlocked another door, this one a dull grey and bearing only the warning, Mind your head.

Behind was a narrow breeze-block passageway with hanging wires, a fluorescent light propped up vertically beside the door, and darkness in both directions beyond.

Opposite, the breeze block had been ripped out to create an opening. A modern metal staircase led down into darkness; foetid air rose up to meet them.

Fia scrunched her nose. “Boak.”

Beyond the staircase, just visible, a grooved, cast-iron column supported a riveted metal superstructure familiar from train stations across the country.

“This’ll be the Victorian platform, then,” said Laura.

“It stinks,” said Fia, turning away.

“Aye,” said Johnny. “But wait till you see what we’ve come to see.” He produced an ancient torch and shone it down the hole.

“Did it smell this bad last time?” asked Laura.

Fia gagged. “No! Jebus Crisp. Who died?”

“Somebody wi’ halitosis and a shitty arse,” said Laura.

Fia sniggered. “Aye, and a giant fan to waft it all aboot with.”

Johnny rounded on them, torch in their faces. “Enough about the smell, okay. Just… enough. It’s no that bad.”

It was that bad, but something else was upsetting Callum. He could hear, faint and echoing, the squeal of brakes, the rickety clank of train wheels over tracks. Impossible.

Johnny stood in the opening, and out came the TV grin and the TV arms, and all mysterious he said, “Are youse ready to experience what life was like in Glasgow nearly one hundred years ago?”

Laura and Fia glanced at each other. A shrug from the teenager.

“Sure,” said Laura, finally. “Be happier if I had a drink to experience it with, but, aye, what the hell?”

“Fine, fine,” said Johnny, and he reached into his Presto bag. “There you go.”

Four cans of Tennent’s Lager appeared, with an old-style logo on one side and pictures of coyly posed young women on the other, all big hair and plunging necklines. The Lager Lovelies. Jesus.

Laura grinned. “Oh, you’re some man, Wee Johnny. They look bang-on.” She fizzed open her can and chugged a mouthful.

“Lovelies for my lovelies.” Johnny winked, jerked a thumb at Callum. “And one for this grumpy prick too. Right, get them necked and on we go.” He descended the stairs with Fia at his back, a skip in her step to keep up with him.

Callum examined his can, tweaking the old-school ring-pull before flipping the thing over and reading the expiry date. Sept 86.

“Laura,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

Laura looked at the date. She stopped short, horror in her eyes. Finally.

“Callum,” she said, “do you think ma ham’ll be all right upstairs? It’ll no freeze in the cold, will it? It’s bone in.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Callum. “Your ham’s fine. Get out the way.”

He bundled past her, down the stairs, trying to pick out Johnny and Fia in the gloom. He couldn’t see them directly, but Johnny’s torchlight swung erratically from behind a nook in the wall up ahead.

What Callum could see was a ruin. Nothing beyond the skeletal remained. No trains, no tracks, just slick bricks and warped wood, and debris all around.

As Callum’s foot touched the platform, Johnny’s torch went out. The darkness was near total, just a sliver of light from the opening above. The echoing clang of Laura’s shoes on the stairs punctuated deathly silence.

“Fia?” said Callum. “Johnny?”

Nothing.

And then a whine, distant and mechanical. A train was coming. That couldn’t be.

But it was.

Callum could see nothing, but beneath his feet a great rumbling took up, steam hissed and popped and screeching brakes reverberated off the bare walls. The thing was coming along the platform.

Callum scrabbled for his phone, fumbled for the torch.

But suddenly a light was on him. It must have been Johnny’s torch but was much too bright and way too close, and among the hissing and screeching and shaking came Fia’s voice.

“Johnny, I said no. I told you it was just a laugh. Fucking pervert!”

And then something hit Callum’s face, something heavy and soft and awful that sent him sprawling to the floor and left a streak of wetness all across him.

The darkness and the silence returned.

Johnny’s torchlight flicked across the ceiling. From somewhere, dripping. Water? Hopefully water.

“Aw, fuck,” Johnny was saying. “Aw, fuck me.”

Callum sat up, rubbed at the wetness on his face. Liquid matted his jacket, cooled at his throat. Too dark to see its colour.

“Has something happened?”

Laura. Her voice floated down the stairs, childlike, thin as a memory.

“Johnny, you there? Somebody tell me what’s happened. Fia? Is it ma wee Fia? What’s happened?”

Callum had dropped his phone when he fell, but there it was, mercifully, at his feet. He picked it up and Siobhan and Cora beamed out at him, the lock-screen picture now bisected by a great crack in the glass.

“Callum,” said Laura. “That you? You need to tell me what’s going on, son.”

Johnny was a long way up the platform now, his light erratic, receding, allowing only brief snapshots of a bricked-up tunnel entrance behind him. No way a train could have come through there.

Callum thumbed his torch app and lit up his hand.

Blood. Of course.

He scrambled to his feet, fighting some urge not to face Laura, not to let her see, because this wasn’t his own blood. He was sure of it. But there was no point in delaying.

He swept his torchlight towards her and illuminated a severed arm on the ground between them.

Fia’s. Ripped away above the elbow.

Laura screamed. “Ma Fia! Ma wee Fia!”

She was off down the platform, into the darkness, Callum running to keep up. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

“Aye, but it was an accident.” Johnny shouted. Only his legs were visible. A great swathe of inky blackness lay between the torchlight arcs. “I thought she’d see it,” he said. “I thought…”

“Help us,” Callum shouted, but Johnny stayed put.

“There,” Laura scrambled down onto the trackbed, shoe half off, the Tennent’s can falling from her hand and rolling away.

Fia was alive, sitting upright. She stared at the stump of her arm, then at Laura, then at Callum.

Then she passed out.

Dark blood gushed from the stump, glistened on the floor as it followed the phantom train.

A tourniquet. Callum jumped onto the trackbed, already reaching for his belt as Laura rushed to Fia, kneeling in all that blood and holding her niece’s head, and looking back at Callum like he could fix all this.

He couldn’t. But he had to do something, so he set his phone on the ground and tightened his belt around Fia’s ruined arm, trying not to see the ragged skin flaps, the pink flesh studded with bright white bone fragments, the viscous, endless blood.

“Oh, Fia.” Laura fussed at Fia’s hair, stroking her too-pale skin. “Oh, ma wee Fia.”

Callum had to wrap the belt three times before it was tight enough but, mercifully, the flow slowed.

“Laura,” he said. “We need an ambulance.”

“Right. Of course.” Laura fished for her phone, turned the screen to Callum. “No bars, son.”

Fuck. “Okay.” He checked his own device. “No bars.”

Laura nodded at Johnny, still at the far end of the platform, his torchlight now unnaturally still. “He’s not going to have a phone, is he?”

Callum shook his head, and in the same moment Johnny put his torch out and was gone. A ghost, spirited away.

“Jesus Christ,” Laura whispered.

“Laura,” said Callum, “I’m going to have to run back upstairs to phone for help. I’ll be as quick as I can. You’ll need some light.”

“Right,” she said, but she only stared into the darkness where Johnny had stood.

“Your phone, Laura. It’s in your hand. Turn on your torch.”

She turned her gaze to Callum, hardly seeming to see him. “Right, son. My torch. Don’t be long.”

Callum climbed back onto the platform, skirted the arm, up the stairs, turning back only momentarily to see, in tableau in the darkness, like a snowglobe on a distant shelf, auntie and niece in terrible embrace.

“Come on, baby,” Laura was saying. “Come on. Oh, ma wee Fia.”

Callum moved on, out through the opening, through the dull grey door and into the underground car park. He killed his torch and held his phone high above him, spun a slow spiral on his heel with eyes on his screen until he heard a key in a lock.

What the fuck?

Johnny, at the grey door. Locking it.

Callum took three steps backwards. “What are you doing, Johnny? They’re still in there. They need… Her fucking arm’s off.”

Johnny grimaced. “I know, I know. It’s fucking dreadful. And her a piano player too. Bloody tragic, mate.”

“She needs an ambulance.”

Johnny just shook his head. “Nah. These guys… Aye, I made a mistake there. Thought they’d loosen you up, help you get into the spirit of the place. But, aye, mibbe best to pretend they just didnae happen.”

“What? They’re…”

“A distraction. Especially that big spooky wan.” He shook his head. “I shouldnae have bothered wi’ them, but you might no have come otherwise. They don’t see what I see. But you do.”

What was he talking about? The train?

Callum took another step backwards. “Fuck off.”

A smile from Johnny. “Aye, you see it.”

Callum had no time for this, so he just turned on his heels and ran. Now he needed the police and an ambulance. Fine. They’d sort him out.

There was no reception in the underground car park anyway, so he raced upstairs, back towards the modern station. Johnny didn’t follow.

The access door was still unlocked, thankfully. Callum battered through it, eyes on his phone, waiting for it to reconnect.

How can there be no reception in Central fucking Station? There was always 5G.

But something felt different. The lights… Had they changed colour? Callum looked up.

The lights were the least of it.

Twenty yards ahead, where the Starbucks should have been, a kiosk: Casey Jones Burger. What the fuck?

Giant advertising hoardings hung from the rafters. Benson & Hedges, one read, and Bring your cheque book in for a free tune up, and, Order by phone.

Callum staggered forward. This was wrong. All wrong. The concourse chairs were gone, the floor now bare concrete and dotted with stubby black litter bins.

The electronic departure board was away too, but Callum knew where he’d find the train times: in the upper windows of the main concession building. Only one train was scheduled for departure. Its destination: Kilmaurs.

Movement in the doorway underneath. Callum flinched, squinted into the shadows between orange gingham curtains, beneath the glowing sign for the Caledonia Restaurant.

Johnny hadn’t followed him, but all the same he was here.

He stepped forward and spread his arms wide. “Welcome to Glasgow Central, Callum.”

“You see it, don’t you? What I see. You’re here. Tell me you’re here, Callum.”

Callum blinked. No point denying it. “I’m here.”

His phone was still in his hand. Subtly, he angled the screen towards him. Still no bars. Oh, hell.

“Callum, pal, naw,” said Johnny, nodding at the phone. “Look about you. It’s 1983. Outer space disnae chat to fancy rectangles here. Put it away. Embrace what’s happening.”

Callum took a step backwards. 1983? His voice was a croak. “What’s happening, Johnny?”

“Magic! Or, I don’t know, something like that. Point is, I’m going home. And I’ll be honest wi’ you: I’m no really a train driver.”

Callum’s stomach fell. Somehow this admission was worse than anything else. Johnny had been lying from the off. “Uh-huh.”

“Or not anymore, at least. Was a train driver, had a bit of an accident, more of a caretaker now. And I cannae fucking leave.” Johnny shook his head. “But it’s somebody else’s turn now. It has to be.” Into the rafters, he shouted, “Surely to fucking goodness!”

Callum swallowed. “Yeah, but not me. It can’t be me. I’ve got a baby. A wee girl. She’s… Please, Johnny. I’m no interested.”

“And you think I was?” He pointed to the timetable above him. “Train to Kilmaurs leaves in ten minutes. That’s my ticket out of here. I’ve arranged it all. Scheduled it up.”

“Okay, but not me.”

“Has to be, mate. Plus you owe me. You owe me.”

“Johnny, I don’t.”

“Aye, you do. Time is weird here, Callum. You’ll find that. You cannae leave, but you can slip through time, forward and back, at least for a little while. I’ve seen this place getting built. I’ve seen it fall. And I’ve seen tonight, many times.” That sympathetic head cock again. “And I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but usually by now you’re lying deid out the front.”

What? No.

“Aye. Sorry. You get in a fight. I think you know who with.”

Callum laughed. No way was this real. No chance. He’d never been in a fight in his life. He wasn’t his dad. He wasn’t. “Bullshit.”

Johnny shrugged. “Lucky punch, shit shoes, down you go. Sorry, pal, but there it is. You don’t get to go back to your wee girl. That’s out of the equation.”

Callum looked at the gates, like the answer might be out there. From his angle, it was impossible to see much beyond them, only that the snow was gone. Orange street lights reflected off slick, powder-free tarmac. Another impossibility.

“And I am sorry about all this, Callum. I know it’s hard to hear. But on the other hand, I did save your life. I intervened. So, aye, you owe me.”

“I don’t believe you. I…” Callum swallowed. “I have… I…”

“I’ve got kids too, you know,” said Johnny. “Or at least I did in 1983. That’s why it has to be now. Why I’ve worked so hard. I know you see how hard I’ve worked. How much I’m fucking concentrating. And the thing that’s holding me here will see it too and just let me go. Just let me go. That’s all I ask. Has it no been long enough?”

A new chill swept through the station and Callum had to adjust his stance, faltering like a weight had been lifted from his back.

“Ha!” Johnny pointed at him. “It’s working. It’s fucking working!”

Callum looked down. His jacket was gone. Underneath, blue overalls. His hand went to the stitched-in logo. British Rail.

“I knew it would work. Fucking yass!”

But Callum was barely listening. He had to get out of here. He sprinted for the main gate, nearly going over on his ankle as he turned. His shoes had changed, replaced with clumpy work boots. Oh, shit. What’s happening?

Callum rattled into the iron gate, pulled at it with all he had. Locked. The street outside was deserted. No people, no taxis, no snow. No body.

Okay. There were at least a half dozen ways out of here. Back inside, round the corner and down the steps onto Union Street. Worth a try.

Johnny watched him go, without bothering to give chase. “You know why it’s working? ’Cos you love this place, Callum. I know you do. You’ll look after it. I’d see you in here all the time. That’s why it had to be you.”

Locked. Where next?

“Always sitting in the Costa Coffee. Or you’d be coming in aff the train and you’d be the only one—the only one out of everyone—to walk through wi’ your head up, taking it all in.”

Hope Street. Back across the concourse, clomping across the concrete, but Callum could see from halfway that the shutter was down. Fuck!

With sudden clarity, he knew the whole place was locked up, as sure as if he’d locked the doors himself. He knew too that Johnny had the keys and that he didn’t have much time.

Johnny had quietened. A smart leather bomber jacket had materialised over his overalls and he was marvelling at it. He fingered its hem, grinning. Fuck.

Callum had never been in a fight in his life. But he thought of Cora, her smile, her smell, her tiny hugs. And he thought of never seeing her again, and of her never seeing him, and of leaving Siobhan to raise her on her own. And he thought, no.

Between Callum and Johnny: Laura’s shopping bags. They still existed, here in 1983. Did that mean Laura and Fia did too? Were they still down there, waiting for help to arrive?

Callum eyed Johnny again. Still distracted by the jacket. If Callum was going to do something, it had to be now.

Something caught his eye, sticking out of Laura’s shopping bag: a ham. Bone in.

That’ll do.

Callum ran at Johnny, picked up the ham leg on the way past. Cold to the touch but still soft. Not frozen. Shit.

He raised it high anyway, now at a full sprint, and Johnny saw him coming.

“What the…”

Callum didn’t slow down. He swung the ham, twisting with his full body, aiming for the head, his feral scream echoing through the station.

It wasn’t enough to knock Johnny out—he’d got a hand in the way at the last second—but it sent him staggering backwards, his fall near arrested until Callum stepped forward again and with his great clompy work boots sent him through the Caledonia Restaurant’s gingham-curtained window.

He landed in a shower of glass, head scudding off a table corner on the way down.

Was he dead? Was that even possible? Callum didn’t wait for an answer. He searched Johnny’s pockets, found the keys. Fled.

Callum smashed through the access door, flung himself down the stairs, through the underground car park, caught his breath at the door marked Mind your head. He didn’t have to guess which key would open it. He just knew.

They were still on the trackbed, held in their distant arc of light, Laura hunched over Fia, who was still unconscious and now deathly pale.

On seeing him, Laura flinched and held her niece closer, but said nothing. There was fear there. Terror. She thinks I’m Johnny.

Callum raced down the stairs. “It’s me, it’s me. It’s just Callum.”

“Callum? Christ. Did youse swap clothes?”

“No.” He ran the length of the platform, readied to jump down, but hesitated. That terror was still there. Laura gripped Fia’s remaining arm so tight it was sure to bruise.

“Are you one as well? Of whatever he is. A demon? Oh, tell me you’re not, Callum.”

“No,” said Callum. “I promise.” I hope. “But we have to get out of here. Now.”

Laura glanced at the exit. “No ambulance?”

Callum shook his head. “Johnny’s locked all the doors. But I’ve got the keys now. I can get us out. We can carry her together.”

Laura took Fia’s hand and clasped it, fingers threading together. She didn’t get up.

“Please,” said Callum, “just trust me.”

Laura took in his boots and his overalls, then looked him square in the eye. “I’ve no got much choice, have I?”

Quickly, they moved, placing Fia on the platform edge while they clambered back up and picked her up again. Laura took the feet, moving backwards until Callum suggested she turn around. Callum grasped Fia under her armpits, her head lolling on his shoulder, while with phone in shaking hand, he tried to light their way.

At the bottom of the stairs, Laura stopped. “The arm. We need her arm. I’m no leaving it.”

“Right,” said Callum. “Of course. Her arm.” And he fought an unseemly stab of impatience that seemed to surface then dissipate in the same moment. What was his hurry?

“They’ll stitch it right back on,” said Laura. “Good as new.”

“Aye, good as new.” And, regardless, there’ll be another tour group down here tomorrow. Can’t have an arm lying around.

Shit, where did that thought come from?

Callum found the arm and grabbed it, though they had to set down their cargo for him to do so, then reload, rebalance, then slowly manoeuvre up the stairs, Callum now with the added awkwardness and ick of the severed hand, which he lay across Fia’s belly and held secure by interlocking its fingers with his own.

An ambulance. Somehow Callum knew there were payphones in front of platforms one and nine, that three of them were properly out of order and one was awaiting cleaning after being doused with beer. If Laura’s phone didn’t work—if it really was 1983—the payphones surely would. But Callum didn’t want to spend another second in the station. Not the way his thoughts were turning. Plus there was a body up there, needing to be cleaned away. A glazier to book.

No, no. That wasn’t right. Concentrate. Callum had killed a man—a ghost?—and his body was lying in plain view. Did they have CCTV in 1983? He needed to get out of the station now.

“Just to warn you,” said Callum, “things look a bit different upstairs. Johnny’s… done things.”

“Aye, and I’ll do things to him,” she mumbled.

“No,” said Callum. “We should just leave. Maybe there’s a doctor in the taxi queue.”

“Right. That’s a plan.”

The main concourse was as he’d left it—the wrong-coloured lights, the concrete floor, the kiosks and adverts from Laura’s youth. If Callum had expected a reaction from her, he didn’t get one. She barely glanced up. Yet for some reason, he wanted her to be impressed.

“You seeing this, Laura?” he asked. “Look—it’s 1983.”

She looked. Nothing. “Right,” she said. “Okay, son. 1983. How are we getting out?”

Callum bristled. She couldn’t see what he saw. And she’d spoken to him like he’d gone mad, like she was humouring a lunatic out of fear and necessity. But why did he care? She was only interested in Fia. Of course she was.

“Main gate,” he said, then regretted his choice. It took them too close to the Caledonia Restaurant, and with Laura at the front, Callum wasn’t steering the ship. Would she be able to see Johnny’s body? Would it still be there?

“Jesus Christ!” she said. “There’s ma ham.”

Right. The ham. “Yep,” said Callum, and before he could conjure an explanation, they were upon the smashed restaurant window and Johnny’s mangled body. Still there.

Laura slowed. Her shoulders slumped. Callum didn’t know if she was seeing the Caledonia or the Marks & Spencers the building had become, but she saw Johnny, all right.

“Just keep moving,” said Callum.

And she did, faster than ever. Callum wanted to explain that in killing Johnny he’d saved her life and—hopefully—Fia’s, but he knew she would nod and agree and not believe him. She’d fallen in with demons, and this was the outcome.

Beyond the gate, the snow had returned, as thick as ever. Maybe good news. And maybe not thickness at all—was it instead a void? Callum had a sense of the station detached from the world, somehow moving through time, in a sort of flux. Could he return to 2025? Was that what Johnny was able to do?

In silence, they set down Fia once more, and Callum unlocked the doors. That squeak again.

“Can’t even see the taxi queue.” Laura avoided Callum’s eye, seemed to be speaking only to herself.

“They’ll be…”

“Is anybody there?” she shouted, cutting across him. “I’m needing help.”

No reply.

“Let’s just get out of here,” said Callum, and they lifted the body again, Laura leading the way with the legs and Callum following until, in an instant, he wasn’t.

He’d stopped dead against the snow, but Laura—already out of sight—kept going, pulling Fia from his arms. If Fia fell, if Laura fell with her, landing in the snow, Callum had no clue. He could see nothing, hear nothing at all.

What the fuck? Callum pressed his hand flat to the void. He felt no cold, no wetness. Only a gentle resistance that grew as he pushed.

“Laura?” he shouted. “Anyone?”

Nothing. And the echo was wrong, like shouting at a wall. What had Johnny said—he could never leave?

Callum stepped back, tripped on something underfoot.

Fia’s arm, forgotten on the floor. Shit, she needs that.

He picked it up, pushed it through. The fingers disappeared, then the wrist and forearm, with no resistance until Callum’s own fingers brushed against the void, whereupon the arm simply vanished.

Okay. Dealt with. There was little point, but Callum wanted to shout after them, to apologise for their ordeal. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was responsible, that he should have taken better care of them.

But they’d left the station. They were on their own. His job was done. Ah, no—one more thing. Laura’s bags. They were still on the concourse.

Callum gathered them, stuffed the ham back in—it didn’t look too bashed, would likely cook just fine; she’d been worried about that—then gently kicked them out the gate and into the void until they too disappeared.

There. Callum wandered back up the concourse, eyeing the seats. There was more to do, but fuck was he ever tired. It had been a hectic day at the station: the snow, the cancellations, the impromptu tour and murder.

He sat, sighed, smoothed down the bristles of his heavy moustache. A moment, then he’d deal with the body and the glass. After that, back down to the Victorian platform to mop up Cora’s blood.

No, not Cora. Fia. Who is Cora?

Fuck! Callum shot to his feet.

Cora Jane Galloway, eight months old. La Bambina, Cora Menora, Professor Partytime. Lady Shenanigan Nonsense. Five teeth and an urge to use them. Resolutely bald. Big hat fan. Her mother’s eyes.

Callum raced for the platforms and jumped the gate, towards the two-carriage Class 303 scheduled for special departure to Kilmaurs in just a few minutes’ time. No, no, none of that jargon: the train home.

Cora’s mother. Siobhan Annabel Galloway. His partner in exhaustion. Two years his junior but the adult in any room. So empathetic she’d root for pocket lint if you named it. A sneeze like a dying elephant. Needlessly profane. A survivor of too much already. But not this.

Instinct took Callum not to the passenger doors but to the driver’s cab where, inside, the controls fell into his hands like an impatient lover.

Johnny thought this a way out, worked hard to arrange it. But he wanted 1983, not 2025. What had he said? Time was funny here—you could slip through it, forward and back. You just had to concentrate.

Right, then. 2025. Cora, Siobhan, Dad. Mobile phones, WhatsApp, Signal, Insta. Digital fucking marketing. Brexit, the pandemic and a cost of living crisis. Climate collapse.

Time to go.

Callum peered out the cab windows. Was the void thinning? Did it look like snow again? Hard to say.

But impossible to delay. Leave the station late without just cause and he’d get written up. The time had come.

Callum took a deep breath, flexed his toes one last time against the pinch of his fancy Italian dress shoes, and accelerated.

Emerging from an elevator a few dozen floors down, I filed in behind a couple of salarymen and was briefly distracted by glimpses of ads for watches, investment counsellors, and canned coffee ahead of me on the skywalk. I wanted to see the coffee ad—it featured a famous American actor—but as soon as I got an unobstructed view of the screen, the ad abruptly changed to one for female hygiene products.

Annoyed, I looked away, then caught sight of something that made me stop in my tracks. Two students from my school were in a skypark halfway to Junco Tower, and they were smoking cigarettes. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I recognized the distinct teal of the girl’s sailor suit. Our school was strict about smoking; getting caught usually led to expulsion. Who would have the guts, or stupidity, to smoke in public, and in uniform?

Before I could think of likely candidates, they put out their cigarettes and left the park, returning to the main skywalk via the single narrow one attached to the park. Now I recognized them. It was Arisa, the infamously pretty-but-weird president of the Noh club, and Hirota, who was in my own homeroom, though we’d never talked much. He was also in the Noh club. Huh.

To avoid running into them, I slipped around the salarymen to enter the skypark they had just vacated. It was tiny and unremarkable with a few vending machines, a smoker’s corner with a large ashtray, a few benches and trees, and a flowerbed. One of the vending machines was for cigarettes. A sudden, reckless urge struck me. I wanted to smoke too. I wasn’t the meek goody two-shoes my mom was trying to mold me into. I could break the law and smoke cigarettes like a delinquent. I’d even do it by myself, for my own satisfaction, not due to peer pressure.

After glancing back to make sure no one was heading my way, I fished out a five-hundred-yen coin and put it into the coin slot. I was glad for Japan’s obstinate liking for hard currency; mom routinely checked the contents of my card statements, and the cigarettes were sure to have been labelled as such.

I picked a brand at random and pushed the button.

Nothing happened.

I pushed the button again.

Clink. A single coin fell to the change tray, and the tiny screen next to the coin slot flashed. Purchase denied — purchaser underage. After a moment, the message disappeared, replaced by an advertisement for anti-breakout facial cleanser, a smiling school girl patting her clear face.

Annoyed, I took the coin from the slot. There must’ve been a camera I hadn’t noticed with some age estimation algorithm. I supposed the Noh club members had gotten someone else to buy their cigarettes for them, or gone to a convenience store—did convenience store workers check age? Well, I couldn’t try it now, at any rate, since I was in my uniform.

Nevertheless, even the attempt had been exciting. It was a tiny, tiny rebellion that I’d be able to remember when my mom got on my nerves.

I resumed my walk, stopping at a bookstore to browse for a bit, then arrived home at dinner time. Tadaima, I called out as I slipped off my black loafers. I’m home.

The okaeri I had expected to hear shouted in response never came. Through a doorway, I glimpsed my dad in the living room, on the couch with his tie loosened and his sleeves rolled up. He said nothing but gave me an odd, hard-to-interpret smile. In retrospect, I think it was meant as encouragement.

The next moment, my mom appeared before me, like a blonde storm cloud wielding a soup ladle, clutched so tight her knuckles were white. “Exactly what do you think you’ve been up to?”

Confused, I glanced at my watch, confirming it really was just eight o’clock. “I… went to Book-Off after cram school and read some manga. Were we supposed to eat early today? If so, I missed that—sorry.”

Mom inhaled sharply. “No, I mean the cigarettes.” She pronounced the word as if she was detonating a bomb in the hallway.

My jaw dropped. “How… how did you know?”

“So you did try to buy cigarettes. Marie, why would you…”

I interrupted. “Really, how did you know?”

She looked annoyed at the interruption, then took out her phone, swiping a couple of times and then holding out the screen to me.

This is an automated message to inform you that Tanimura Marie attempted to buy a pack of Mevius Light at Skypark 714 at 19:12 this evening. The identification certainty level is 97.6% and based on facial recognition confirmed for feasibility with Tanimura’s latest location records.

I stared at the message, incredulous. “That… that is such a violation of privacy!” I stuttered finally. “Is that even legal?”

“Marie,” mom hissed, “you are the one who tried to break the law! And you’re underage—it’s perfectly normal that we were informed. Now, the bigger question is, why would you do such a stupid thing? Who put you up to this?”

“No one,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I just felt like it.” Normally, my mother’s anger would’ve immediately reduced me to contrite apologies, but now I was too shocked, and too angry myself, to be cowed. I wasn’t angry with her, though, but with the vending machine, with that surveillance system that had sold me out. I felt violated, as if discovering I had been watched while undressing.

“That’s hardly likely, now, is it? Out with it. Was it one of the girls in your homeroom? I could see Rie having some harebrained idea like this. Or did someone bully you into it?”

 “I said, no one.” Losing my patience, I raised my voice. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” I swept past her and into my room, slamming the door behind me, surprised at my own courage in the face of my mom’s anger.

“Marie, we’re not done talking,” she yelled through the door. She began to turn the doorknob, but before she had opened the door, my dad’s calm voice sounded from further away. “Leave her be for now, Hanna. Now’s not the time.”

Mom didn’t say a word about the cigarettes at breakfast the next morning—nor anything else, for that matter. Either dad had persuaded her to cut me some slack, or she was brooding over what new, draconian rules to impose as punishment.

My resolve had hardened, though. At lunch break that day, I headed upstairs to where the gym and club rooms were located. I walked down the corridor outside the club rooms, reading the lettered signs on each door. Baseball club. Judo club. Karuta club.

Noh club.

I knocked on the door before I had a chance to get anxious and change my mind. After a moment, someone called out, “Come in.”

I opened the door and almost jumped. A hundred faces were staring at me. Then I saw they were masks: countless Noh masks of men, women, and demons, mounted all over the walls. There were only four human faces. Hirota sat by a small table, a convenience-store lunch spread out in front of him, and on the floor sat Arisa, plus a boy sipping chocolate milk and a girl with a scarf wrapped around her neck.

“Yes?” scarf girl said.

“Sorry to disturb you guys,” I said. “I was just wondering… Wait.” I pushed the door shut behind me, then looked at Arisa and Hirota in turn. “I saw you guys smoking cigarettes in a park yesterday.”

The three sitting on the floor exchanged a glance. Hirota had been about to take a bite from a custard bread, but froze.

“And, I wanted to know how you went about buying them,” I continued.

“Why?” Hirota asked, frowning.

“Because I want to buy cigarettes, too.”

Hirota had resumed eating. “You want to buy cigarettes?” he asked between mouthfuls of bread.

I nodded. “I tried to yesterday evening, from a vending machine in that park, but it didn’t work, and apparently, it sent an alert to my parents, so I got totally chewed out. I hadn’t known it could do that. So now I really want to buy cigarettes.” I laughed.

The three on the floor exchanged glances again, then Arisa looked at me, a little too long and a little too intensely.

Scarf girl piped up. “Sorry, but we can’t help you. You’ll have to figure it out on your own.”

Before I could decide on what to say, Arisa spoke. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t tell her.”

Scarf girl and chocolate milk boy protested indignantly. “But Arisa, she isn’t even…”, “Prez, we don’t know if we can trust her…”

What was this big secret to buying cigarettes? They were acting like it was some sort of arcane, privileged information, so clearly, they hadn’t just asked someone’s big sister to do it.

I waited while a staring contest continued between the three club members on the floor, as if they were attempting a telepathic debate about the merits of telling me.

 “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” I said, finally. “Thanks anyways.” I opened the door, then glanced at the walls again. “Also, your masks are really cool.”

The next few days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the vending machine that had sold me out, about what the great cigarette-buying secret might be, and about the Noh club. I was no longer thinking about what club to join; the Noh club was the only one that intrigued me now, but I hadn’t gotten the impression they were looking for new members.

The following Tuesday, my cram school class got rescheduled to the last slot of the evening. It was past ten and dark above the skywalks when I finally headed home, and the bars I passed in Junco Tower were lively with businesspeople from the nearby office floors.

At a corner after the last izakaya on the floor, I saw Arisa.

She was dressed in jeans, a hoodie, and a baseball cap, a large shopping bag slung over her shoulder. She was looking down at her phone, and I was debating whether to stop and say hi when she suddenly put it away, turned, and disappeared into a door that I had never noticed before.

Without thinking, I followed her.

The door led to a stairwell. Arisa climbed the stairs, exiting again two floors up. I kept my distance and exited a few moments after her. I emerged into a floor of offices, empty and dimly lit; only the corridors had the lights on, while the offices were pitch black. I looked around for Arisa, then heard a rustling sound from around a corner.

I padded quietly in the direction of the sound and spotted her again, now standing in front of a large door in glass and stainless steel; it must’ve been the entrance to some swanky corporation. She rummaged through the shopping bag, then pulled out something I couldn’t identify, a shapeless mass of beige and gray and pink. Then, she removed her baseball cap and pulled the thing over her head.

I gasped.

Arisa’s face was now that of a man in his fifties. The shapeless thing had been a mask. Not a stylized Noh mask or one of those jokey rubber masks caricaturing famous people, but an incredibly lifelike one; it looked as if the head of a man had been transplanted onto the body of a teenage girl. The effect was so uncanny, I felt like I was going to be sick.

Arisa tilted her neck backwards, looking up. I followed her gaze—or the gaze of the middle-aged man, rather—and noticed a camera mounted above the door. Then she lowered her head and stepped forward.

Nothing happened.

She waved a hand, as if to activate a motion sensor, then mumbled something I couldn’t make out. She stepped back, tugged at the mask, and looked up at the camera again. Then she stepped forward once more, and again, nothing happened. Now, she cursed audibly.

I was watching this, fascinated, when I heard a noise from the other side. A security guard had just entered the floor: a gray-haired man wielding a flashlight, probably a part-time retiree on his standard patrol route.

I looked back at Arisa. She didn’t seem to have noticed. I wasn’t sure what she was up to, but I suspected she wouldn’t want to get caught doing it. I dashed out from my hiding place.

“There’s a security guard just around the corner,” I hissed at her. “Take off the mask.”

She stood frozen for a moment, then removed the mask. The middle-aged man’s face seemed to crumple and collapse, and had I not been so nervous and high on adrenaline, I would’ve felt nauseated again. Then her own face was revealed, and she had just stuffed the mask back into the shopping bag when the guard turned the corner and saw us.

“Ora! What are you misses doing here?” he asked, walking up to us. “Everything on this floor is closed for the night, you know.”

“We were going to surprise her dad with an evening snack delivery to the office,” I said, letting my gaze flicker to the big paper shopping bag Arisa was holding. “But it turns out he’d already finished for the night.” I laughed as if this was a big joke.

“Aw, that’s sweet of you girls.” Then his tone turned mock-gruff. “But you ought to be in bed at this time. There; off you go.”

He shooed us away and I acquiesced, grabbing Arisa by the elbow and steering her towards the door to the stairwell. She didn’t say a word until we emerged among the bars and crowds two floors down. “Let’s go over there,” she said, nodding toward a skypark.

It was empty save for a salaryman tapping away on a smartphone in a corner, oblivious to the world. We headed for the opposite corner.

Arisa turned to me. “Thanks for that. It would’ve been bad if I’d gotten caught.” She didn’t ask why I had been there.

I nodded.

“I should’ve paid more attention myself, but I was so frustrated that the damn thing wouldn’t work.” She plopped down on a bench and rummaged in the shopping bag. Eventually she fished out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you want one?” she asked suddenly.

“No, thank you,” I said automatically. “But… what were you doing back there with that terrifyingly real middle-aged dudeface? And where did you get that?”

Arisa looked pleased. “I made it. It’s modelled after an employee there. I was testing it to see if it was good enough to fool those ID cameras and unlock the door. The answer is no, unfortunately.”

“But… what is that place, and why do you want to get in there?”

“It’s just some real estate company, and I don’t.” She lit her cigarette. “But their facial recognition algorithm is really good, and making a mask that can fool it would be a big achievement.”

“Don’t all the ID cameras work the same way?”

“No, no, not at all!” She stood up and waved her cigarette, excited. “There’s a whole range. Like, some really old beer and cigarette vending machines are so shitty you can literally take an eyeliner and draw lines on your face in a certain pattern, like wrinkles, and it’ll trick them into thinking you’re an adult. And on the other extreme, some corporations have ones that are practically like retinal scans. That place,” she nodded toward Junco Tower, “is fairly advanced. We use it for testing purposes. So far, none of us have succeeded in making a mask that’s good enough, though. Except granny, of course.”

Granny? I had so many new questions, I barely knew where to start. “Who’s ‘we’?” I finally decided on the question that was bothering me the most.

“Why, The Noh club, of course.” She smiled. “The name is a bit misleading. It’s more like the Noh-and-privacy-protection club. Most of us are privacy rights activists. Ogura is the only one who’s hardcore Noh-only. Do you want to join?”

Noh and privacy protection. I hadn’t expected that. “Privacy rights activist” had a punky, rebellious ring to it, but Noh was ultra-high culture. “That is so cool,” I said, then it hit me that she had asked if I wanted to join. “But… I don’t know anything about Noh. Or about privacy.”

“You can learn.”

My phone vibrated audibly, and I recalled how late it was. “I have to go; that’s probably my mom, wondering why I’m not home yet.”

Arisa nodded, then stubbed out her cigarette. “If you’re interested,” she said, “I’ll show you the workshop after school tomorrow.”

“Good evening, sensei,” Hirota and Nanami—that was scarf girl’s name—called out as we emerged from a staircase into the workshop. The workshop covered most of the second floor of Arisa’s house. Yes—a house, like in the remotest of suburbs, except this one was squeezed in between Junco Tower and another high-rise; they must’ve been under siege with developers and yakuza wanting to buy the plot.

The workshop was divided in two. Half had tatami mats and antique furniture and Noh masks covering the walls. It was in this half that sensei, an old woman, sat working by a low table. The other half had laminate flooring and furniture in bright white, lifelike latex masks mounted on stands.

Hirota plopped down on the tatami floor, relaxing, while Nanami beelined for a worktable on the other side. Arisa knelt down next to the old woman, motioning for me to follow. The woman was working on a Noh mask, carving the corners of its eyes with a fine scalpel.

“Granny, this is Marie. Marie, this is my grandma. She’s a Noh mask artisan. And she pioneered the latex painting techniques we use for the other masks.”

The woman looked up from her work. “Are you a new member?” Before I could answer, she continued, “Our family has been Noh mask carvers for four generations. Arisa here will be next; her father didn’t have any talent for mask-carving.” She put down her scalpel to pat Arisa on the shoulder.

“Arisa’s parents are both big digital rights activists,” Hirota said, leaning back on his elbows. “Like, super big. That’s another of the reasons we hang out here: my parents would be totally freaking out that we were doing something illegal.”

“Is this illegal?” I asked, nervously.

Arisa’s granny chuckled, then returned her attention to the mask.

“Depends,” Arisa said, getting up. I followed her to the modern side of the workshop, where Nanami had gotten to work on a lifelike mask, a superfine brush in her hand. The mask depicted an older Western woman, but it was nowhere near as realistic as the one Arisa had worn the day before.

Arisa looked over Nanami’s shoulder as she spoke. “There’s nothing illegal about making a mask. It is sometimes—but not always—illegal to use a mask to trick a facial recognition algorithm. Let’s say now that you’re impersonating a specific person and entering a place using their face as credentials. If you don’t actually enter the place, it’s a bit more of a gray zone. And if you’re not impersonating a specific person but just happen to like wearing masks that make you look like a different gender, or perhaps thirty years older, that’s usually—but not always—legal.”

I nodded, watching Nanami make the tiniest brush strokes along the nostrils of the mask. Then she paused, resting her wrist against the table. I wanted her to know I didn’t hold any grudges for her refusal to share the big cigarette secret with me a few days earlier, so I asked politely, “Nanami-san, what’s the reason you decided to join the Noh club?”

She turned to me. “Because of Arisa. And because I don’t like personalized advertising. I had never really thought about it much, but after Arisa told me how face-based advertising worked, it really upset me. Like, we go about our lives boxed in by our own faces, constantly having the world tell us who we’re supposed to be, where we can go and what we should buy and do and watch. I hate it.” She paused, looking down at the mask. “So it feels good to use another face once in a while. And I like the artistic aspects of mask-making, too, though my own masks are still not very good.”

That was exactly it, I thought, as Nanami resumed her painting. I didn’t want to be told who I was supposed to be any more either.

So I joined the Noh club, and I couldn’t say what I loved the most: learning about privacy laws with Arisa’s parents and our adrenaline-fueled outings to test masks in the night-time, or our monthly outings to the National Noh Theater, where the actors transformed into demons or courtiers with the help of finely carved, stylized masks, like those made by Arisa’s grandmother.

At the dinner table at home, I gushed about how Noh masks can appear to change expression based on the angle of the light or the stage presence of Noh actors I had seen. Mom was both out of her depth and fundamentally in awe of anything “traditionally Japanese,” so she never pried, and the Noh club became my sphere of freedom.

A few weeks before the end of the school year, I completed my first realistic mask, and Arisa and Hirota joined me late in the evening at Skypark 714 to try it out. They kept a lookout over the skywalk adjoining the park, and once they had assured me that the coast was clear, I pulled the mask out of my bag. It depicted an elegant older woman; I had modelled it on the old folk singer Misora Hibari in full stage makeup.

I tugged it over my head, then approached the cigarette vending machine warily. It was the same one where I had obliviously tried to buy cigarettes almost a year earlier. Rather than the glamorous Hibari, it would’ve been more fitting had I worn a Noh mask of the vengeful samurai Soga Tokimune.

I put a five-hundred-yen coin into the coin slot, then hesitated over what to pick.

“Get the regular Mevius,” Hirota shouted. “If you don’t like them, I’ll take them.”

I pushed the button for a pack of Mevius, then tilted my head to look directly into where I now knew the facial recognition camera was mounted. We waited in expectant silence.

Thump.

I bent down to fish out a pack of cigarettes from the slot and held it out toward Arisa and Hirota. “Look,” I said, as amazed and proud as a new parent. “It worked!”

“Good,” Arisa said, giving one of her rare smiles, while Hirota let out a whoop and pumped his fist in the air. “Well done, Marie!”

We bought ourselves cans of hot coffee from another of the vending machines and sat down. I unwrapped the pack of cigarettes reverently and extracted one. I had never held a cigarette before.

Arisa handed me a lighter, and I attempted to light the cigarette without much success.

Hirota laughed. “You have to inhale while you light it, you know.”

“Oh,” I said sheepishly. I succeeded on the next attempt and inhaled deeply, then began to cough. It tasted disgusting, and I felt weirdly nauseated. Hirota laughed again, while Arisa moved closer to pat me on the back. Once I stopped coughing, I got up and put the cigarette out in the ashtray. Then, I handed Hirota the pack. “Well, that was a lot of trouble for something I will never do again. Gross!” Arisa and Hirota both laughed this time. I sat down to sip my coffee, and despite the exhaust-fume taste in my mouth, I felt happy and free.

> Beloved sophonts, dearest beings,
>
> You do not know me, but I greet you from my dreary
> exile. I am the persecuted relict of a once-
> admired and honoured warrior and statesman. Envy
> and corruption brought him low, secured his sad
> discorporation, leaving me with all his wealth — his
> myriad possessions: weapons, knowledge, precious
> metals, gems, and all the rest.
>
> Yet I am watched and hounded by my enemies; I have
> no haven where I can enjoy my rich bequest — I need
> your help. Please send a starship to me, fully fuel-
> led, and with the details of your planetary location.
> I shall come with all the riches that my late depart-
> ed brother-uncle-husband left me. For this aid, I’ll
> give to you a fifth of all I have.
>
> May the wise and loving spirit of the cosmos guide
> you and protect you.
>
> Mrs ∇∷⌣⋑∦ô

Buff Patrol

                                        sublunar but above the Kármán line
                                                                  around the spinning Earth
                                                                            there’s surreptitious motion.

                                              in darting spacecraft — little more
                                                        than bulky suits —
                                                                  the vandals creep in darkness,
                                                                                  running silent:
                                                                                        taggers, writers,
                                                                                                  activists,
                                                                      all scrawling on the sky,
                                                          their heaven spot.
                                              countless tiny bots, they spray,
                                      invisible until they flare
                                                    in glaring, star-eclipsing brightness.

                  but it’s not my job to hunt them down,
          to tangle-field them,
                        reel them in;                                                          
                                  I venture out,
                                          my craft no larger,
                                      no more capable than theirs,
                        and scrub the sky clean,
              sweeping up the photopellets,
    buffing back to blackness,
                              making sure that those below
                                        can gaze at constellations,
                                                  wish upon a falling star,
                                                                  make love in moonlight
                                                                            navigate the trackless seas by night.

It was a tradition with us. We would gather on the terrace in front of our offices every Midsummer Eve as the sun slowly went down into the sea and tell stories. Not the usual anecdotes about what happened to this or that mutual acquaintance but stories, in the truest sense of the word. Snippets of legends we had heard so long ago, we could hardly remember them properly, myths we adjusted for the occasion, dreams we thought would fit the eerie atmosphere, when the sun seemed to refuse to set and the world felt as if it had ground to a halt. 

We became different people during those evenings. Usually, we were typical nine-to-five office workers, not revealing much about our personal lives except for conventional, socially acceptable snippets: significant others, children, vacation spots. We steered clear of deeper topics: fear and dreams hiding in the forgotten corners of our minds, how we saw the world, the songs we heard in the night. We could not mention those under the neon glow of office lights.

Yet for one night a year, we became something else—or maybe it was the only time we thought it would be safe to be entirely ourselves. The real us, who still remembered ancestral fears, who saw beyond the trappings of our modern existence into a darker, lonelier world, where forests and seas and stars were sacred and more than just objects in the background of our busy lives.

We took turns telling our stories. There was no particular order. Midsummer Eve did not ask for hierarchies. Or maybe there was a hierarchy but it was hidden from us. We could not understand it.

Then came the night Kaya told her story for the first time and we never got together again to share our tales on Midsummer Eve.

2

Kaya had always been an unknown element for us. She did not take part in usual office banter, the classic back-and-forth with which we occupied most of our breaks. She did her job and went home. We didn’t even know where she lived—well, someone in Human Resources probably did, her records had to be stored somewhere—but none of us had felt inclined to investigate further. Kaya was a good worker but otherwise invisible and we all had the feeling that that was what she wanted.

Until that year, Kaya had never taken part in our Midsummer ritual. One year, she made her excuses and said something had come up. Another time, she got a phone call in the middle of our outing and had to leave. All innocuous incidents. Not enough for us to suspect that she was avoiding the moment she would be asked to tell a story as the sun went down.

In truth, I don’t know why Kaya was there that evening or why she answered our challenge so readily. Perhaps she wanted to show us what real stories could do, how they could overturn reality and ruin the veil of safety between our imaginations and us. Maybe she knew too much and was tired of bearing the burden alone. Or maybe she had not meant to do it. Maybe she had no idea her story would have such an impact on us.

“It’s your turn, Kaya.”

Kaya looked at each of us in turn and for a moment we were afraid that she would refuse. But then her face changed and I could swear she was no longer only herself, as if there was someone else inhabiting her body, someone in a reckless, mischievous mood, willing to unleash chaos just for the sake of it.

“Look over there,” Kaya said, pointing up ahead. “What can you see there?”

As one, we followed Kaya’s finger.

“Water,” I said. “The sea.”

“I think I see a boat,” someone else announced.

Others nodded sagely. I didn’t because I couldn’t see any boat and I suspected everyone else was just playing along.

“The sun,” the new guy in marketing said. “You’re talking about the sun, aren’t you?”

“No, she’s talking about the gulls. Look at them, circling the horizon.”

“I think she’s talking about one gull in particular. It’s the closest one, right? The one with the black head?”

 By now we were all pitching in, enjoying the game for its own sake, forgetting its main objective. Kaya was watching us with a faint smile as if we were children and she was an adult indulging us. Eventually, she shook her head.

“No—I meant none of those things. I was wondering if you could see the shadow on the water.”

We were silent. None of us wanted to say it but we all knew there was no shadow on the water.

“It’s alright,” Kaya said. “I know you can’t see it, yet. You will, once I finish my story.”

That should have been our warning. Our sign that we shouldn’t do this. That we should ask Kaya to stop. At that point, though, we didn’t care about warnings. We wanted to see the shadow on the water.

3

“My grandmother told me this story,” Kaya began. “She knew it from her own grandmother who had heard it from a fortune-teller, traveling with a circus. The fortune-teller had sworn it was true.”

We all nodded. Our stories often began like this. I am certain none of us thought there was any truth in such an introduction. Still, we allowed ourselves to believe it, if only for one night. In those brief hours, all stories had the possibility to be real. Even the most outrageous ones. Especially the most outrageous ones.

“The fortune-teller came from some exotic southern land,” Kaya went on. “She did not like our country. It was too cold, too dark. There were creatures she did not know whispering at every crossroad. And there was a shadow on the sea.”

She had not seen the shadow when she had first arrived. Then, one day, she overheard the sword-swallower mentioning a shadow. And then on, the shadow was always there on the sea, calling out to her but repelling her at the same time. She was surprised she had not noticed it from the beginning.

“What is that?” she asked one evening when she was sure she could not take it anymore.

 What bothered her the most was that no one seemed to ever talk about the shadow on the sea. It was as if the thing was normal for them. As if every sea should have its shadow.

“That,” Bert, the sword-swallower, said. “That is the shadow of the lighthouse, of course. What else would it be?”

 The fortune-teller frowned.

“I don’t see any lighthouse. How can it cast a shadow if it’s not there?”

Bert looked at her as if she was a child who had not learned the true ways of the world yet. It annoyed the fortune-teller to no end. She was at least ten years Bert’s senior.

“It’s the lighthouse of souls, Hilda. Of course you can’t see it.”

The fortune-teller’s name was actually Hadil, not Hilda but Bert had never been good at remembering names he had not heard around him since birth.

“A lighthouse of souls. What does that mean? Whose souls?”

Bert shrugged.

“Mine. Theirs,” he added, jerking his head towards the rest of the troupe who were swaying drunkenly several paces away, completely oblivious to the conversation. “Now that you’ve noticed the shadow—yours.”

Hadil trembled. The words were like ice to her.

“Why mine?”

“You wouldn’t have seen the shadow otherwise. It only appears to those whose souls are already trapped inside.”

4

That night, Hadil dreamed about the lighthouse for the first time.

She first saw it as a column of smoke, swaying against the red horizon. Hadil was flying above it and as she got closer, the smoky column gained substance and turned into a tower of stone with a point of light at the top. Only the light was not yellow, as it should have been. It was green.

Hadil found herself descending quickly towards the lighthouse against her will. One moment she was seeing it from above, the next she was inside, standing at the foot of the spiral staircase that led up to the tower.

Hadil hesitated briefly. She did not know if she should go up or try to find a way out. Logic and the inclination for self-preservation whispered to her that she should remain on the ground floor and try to escape. But when she tried to follow that sound advice, Hadil found that her feet would not move. She could not go anywhere but up. Something was compelling her to climb the stairs.

Hadil had seen many things in her lifetime. She came from a long line of fortune tellers, witches and priests. Her kind could speak to gods and spirits of the earth often appeared in their dreams. Hadil herself had witnessed sacrifices to dark forest gods, ritual dances and initiation rites that took one to the blackest places. Wraiths had chased her and once she had even battled an ancient basilisk. She was not afraid of the unnatural. Ghosts and spooks were familiar to her.

 Despite her knowledge, Hadil was sure she had never felt such strangeness and such malice as she did now, climbing the stairs to the lighthouse tower. The lighthouse of souls, Bert had called it, and Hadil could tell it was true. She could feel them—millions of imprisoned souls shadowing her, surrounding her, speaking of millennia of despair, begging to be set free.

Hadil’s heart was breaking. She could not stand to watch so many souls suffering. It did not matter that their owners were long dead or that they were alive and did not know what was happening to their souls inside the lighthouse. All that mattered was the suffering—Hadil had never been able to witness suffering without trying to help.

“Help how?” a voice that sounded like Bert’s hissed in her ear. “You’re trapped here like the rest of us. What could you possibly do to help?”

When Hadil woke up, she was back in her bed in the trailer she shared with the two ballerinas. They were both fast asleep but they now looked lifeless to Hadil. As if their souls no longer belonged to them.

5

Days passed, deceptively uneventful. Bert did not act as if he was aware that Hadil had encountered his soul in the lighthouse. But the more Hadil looked around, the more she realized everyone she knew had their souls imprisoned there. The lighthouse had claimed the entire town.

“This won’t do,” Hadil decided. “They have to be set free.”

It wasn’t just altruism. She could feel her own soul becoming tangled inside the lighthouse. She dreamed about it every night now. She had to find a way to break the spell before her own soul was completely claimed. Otherwise, there would be no escape.

Hadil searched the lighthouse from top to bottom. She discovered that the green light at the top of the tower came from the captured souls. But why was there a light there in the first place? What was it supposed to guide?

Apart from the souls, there seemed to be no one else at the lighthouse. Still, every night, Hadil was sure she could sense an absence. Something was about to arrive or had just left. Hadil never managed to encounter whatever it was but she suspected that creature was responsible for the missing souls. Maybe, if she dealt with the creature, she would be able to free the souls. She could make it give them up. Or, as a last resort, she could kill it, and that would release its hold on the souls.

Hadil knew things the people in those parts did not know. She knew spells that would keep her asleep for days without killing her. She could remain inside the lighthouse when the soul keeper came. She would be able to confront it.

“You are mad,” Bert told her. “Madder than I thought you can be and that’s saying something.”

“But you will help me,” Hadil insisted. “Bert, you would be helping yourself, too.”

 She had come to Bert that morning and presented her plan: she was going to place herself in a three-day trance. Bert was to remain by her side and make sure nothing happened to her body in the real world. If she showed signs of distress, he was to try and wake her up.

“I’m surprised you’re asking me to do this,” Bert went on. “I was sure you didn’t like me.”

That much was true. Hadil, however, had learned a long time ago that not liking someone did not necessarily have to mean not trusting them. She trusted Bert more than she had trusted anyone else in her life.

“You will help me,” she repeated, and it was not phrased as a question—they both knew that that’s what Bert would do.

Bert lifted his hand and touched Hadil’s shoulder briefly.

“I wish I was coming with you.”

 Hadil wondered if Bert also dreamed of the lighthouse.

“We both have a part in this. Yours is here. Mine is in the lighthouse.”

“Do you know what to do?” Bert asked.

Hadil nodded curtly.

“Find the person who is holding the souls and convince them to free us—one way or another.”

6

Hadil prepared a potion and whispered secret words over it. She lay down and repeated a few other words that her grandmother had taught her long ago when they were hiding from a sand-spirit. She was aware of Bert watching her uneasily but she did not say anything. Bert was never going to understand her ways but he would still obey her instructions.

She found the lighthouse instantly. She was once more on the spiral staircase. Her soul was struggling like a captive moth against one of the windows, as if suspecting there was the possibility it could be freed. Bert’s soul was next to hers.

“Don’t worry,” Hadil told them. “After tonight we will all be free.”

She climbed the stairs. Sensing her determination, several souls followed her. They formed a protective barrier between Hadil and the lighthouse. Hadil smiled, wondering if she knew any of them. The only souls she could recognize were Bert’s and her own.

The room at the top of the tower was the same as ever. The green lamp threw trembling shadows on the floor as hundreds of corrupted souls swayed around the lamp. Only the most damaged souls powered the light. Hadil doubted she could save those. But she could put an end to the indignity they were forced to suffer. That would have to be enough.

Hadil did not know how long she waited for the dreadful presence to enter the tower. It felt too long. Her potion would only last three days. Then, she would wake up, whether she encountered the enemy or not. She was beginning to think she had gone about this all wrong. The keeper of souls would only come when her dream self was not there. He would wait for her to wake up and all this would have been for nothing.

After a while, when she was ready to give up hope, Hadil heard heavy footsteps on the spiral staircase. She tensed. Souls were light. You could not hear them as they moved. This could not be another dreamer, either. Not many would have managed to get up the stairs before they woke up. This was it, then. Their captor was finally on his way.

 In those moments, as she listened to the lumbering footsteps, Hadil wondered what she would see. She imagined green slimy creatures dragged out from the sea, or misbegotten monsters, half-human, half-beast, with claws and fangs and yellow eyes. She thought of a gigantic spider scuttling towards the green light to feed on the souls.

What entered the room was a dwarf, much shorter than Hadil. Its shadow was gigantic in the light of the candle he was holding but the creature itself was small and wizened. He looked as if he was barely holding himself together. Hadil suspected he would have crumbled into a million pieces, had it not been for the souls keeping him alive.

The dwarf’s skin was white to the point of being translucent; his sunken eyes were green and empty. He himself didn’t have a soul, Hadil realized. Whether he kept it imprisoned in the lighthouse with the others or he had lost it some other way, it was hard to tell. Nor did it matter. He was the enemy, and Hadil could not have sympathy for the enemy.

 The dwarf did not notice Hadil at first. He shuffled to the window and looked outside. The sea was restless. The dwarf rubbed his hands together, grinning.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Good. More souls for me. Storms always bring more souls. Good.”

Hadil stepped forward.

“Why do you need the souls?”

The dwarf froze, although his shadow still shivered and swayed. Some of the souls disentangled themselves from him and fluttered towards Hadil. Others remained bound to him, unable to break free. Slowly, the creature turned around and Hadil sensed that if she looked too long at him, she would be trapped inside the lighthouse forever.

“You should not be here,” the dwarf hissed. “Everyone wakes when I come.”

He was jabbing his finger at her while he spoke, although he was not touching her yet. Hadil stood her ground.

“Well, I am still here. And that means only one thing. I want you to free the souls.”

The dwarf tilted his head.

“Which souls?” he asked mockingly.

Hadil took a step forward.

“All souls. Every single one.”

She reached out and her hand fastened around the dwarf’s arm. The touch made her shudder. The skin did not feel like that of a living being but like some strange thing at the bottom of a muddy lake, slippery and sinuous. The strong stench of seaweed made her choke.

 “You will give us what I ask for,” she said, speaking clearly, her voice steady. “Every soul you have taken, you will set them free.”

The dwarf creature stood still for a long time as if Hadil’s words had turned him to stone. He had not encountered defiance in his prey before.

“What can you do to me, desert daughter?” he challenged. “I am from a world different from yours. My laws are different laws.”

Hadil shook her head.

“No law can accept the stealing of souls. My soul does not belong to you. None of these souls do. And I am here to get them back.”

The dwarf’s laughter sounded like the crack of dry branches consumed by fire. Hadil shivered but did not release him.

“Even if you free the souls and dispose of me, there are more of us in the world. At the right time, another will take my place. The lighthouse can never be destroyed. It will always be there, and it will always pull souls to it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hadil said. “Because my soul will be free and so will everyone else’s that is here now. As for what comes after, those people in the future will have to attend to it themselves.

She abruptly let go of her opponent, flinging him backwards. The dwarf staggered but remained on his feet.

And suddenly, he was not a dwarf anymore but a tall, slender creature, so dark it could have come from the caverns beneath the earth where no sun had ever reached. This was something older than Hadil and her desert, than sea or land, or life as Hadil knew it.

Hadil sprang at the creature but it knocked her down. She got back on her feet. Her next blow caused her enemy to stagger, moving closer to the window.

The fight between Hadil and the soul-stealing dwarf was a summer hailstorm and a winter blizzard. It was the sea engulfing the shore and the forest fire swallowing ancient trees, the sky tumbling over the unsuspecting world. The dwarf was skilled and had the strength of a dozen men. But Hadil had her will and her stubbornness, and she was not going to give in to some thieving upstart.

The battle lasted two days and two nights—Bert would tell Hadil this later, when she woke up. She had no idea of the passage of time while she was fighting. All she knew was that moment when her life hung in the balance and the fate of so many souls depended on her victory.

On the third night, Hadil’s strength was fading. She had fallen and the dwarf was now standing above her in the shape of an eagle beating its gray wings and striking at Hadil with its beak. Hadil tried her best to keep him from plucking out her eyes. She pulled out her small knife and struck at the beast.

She could not injure him but she did force him to turn again into a dwarf. Hadil watched as he staggered backwards and noticed how close he was to the open window.

Hadil gathered her failing strength and got up. She was shaking and her limbs were barely obeying her anymore. The time had come to put an end to this. She launched herself at the dwarf who slipped and fell out of the window.

Hadil fell against the edge, panting. The desperate cry of her enemy echoed in her ears.

“I killed him,” Hadil thought and the notion struck at her heart.

The creature had stolen her soul and the souls of so many others. It had to be stopped. He certainly would not have hesitated to kill Hadil. Still, none of these arguments could make Hadil feel any better.

As she knelt there with her entire world overturning, she suddenly felt a warm touch on her face. It was her own soul, come to comfort her. Hadil smiled.

“Hello. It has been a while, hasn’t it?”

She became aware of the other souls, some coming to greet her, others fading back to their owners. She watched as they flew, leaving a golden trail behind. There would be many shooting stars above the sea that night.

7

Hadil opened her eyes to find herself back in her trailer. Bert was leaning over her. He was crying.

“Hadil,” he whispered when he saw she was awake.

It was the first time that he had bothered to say her real name and the syllables sounded sweet and bright on his lips. Hadil frowned, noticing the glint behind his eyes.

“You’re different.”

“You gave me back my soul,” Bert reminded her.

She watched the new softness in his features and decided she could like him with a soul.

“You did it,” Bert went on. “You fought the darkness and won.”

Hadil shuddered, remembering the wretched creature and what had happened to it.

“Is the lighthouse still there?”

Bert shook his head.

“I can see no shadow on the sea now. No one can.”

“It’s only temporary, though,” Hadil said, thinking about what the dwarf had told her.

The shadow and the lighthouse would be back again. Bert did not seem too bothered by that, though. He embraced Hadil and she could feel that he was hugging her with his newly-returned soul. The soul that Hadil had given back to him. Maybe that was enough. Maybe the future did not have to be her responsibility after all.

8

Kaya finished her story. At first, we congratulated her. It was a good story: light versus darkness and good winning, at least for a while. What was not to like? Then, we remembered that “for a while” part and realized that Kaya had claimed she had been told it was a true story. That night, we all saw the shadow on the water.

I do not know which one of us dreamt of the lighthouse first or was the first to discover their soul was now imprisoned there. We did not talk about such things at the office. They belonged to our Midsummer festivities and we never held one of those since that night.

 Kaya left soon after. She did not hand over her notice or turn in her office equipment. She simply vanished. One evening, she went home and did not come in the next morning.

We wondered, of course. Did she go to confront the stealer of souls from the lighthouse as Hadil had? Or, since she had been the one to point the shadow of the lighthouse, was she its keeper? Was she the one who now held our souls?