Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Adventures

Book 466: Mammoth Books

by Sean Wallace

Genres: Fantasy; Steampunk

Synopsis

From the editor of The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, this anthology of steam-powered short stories, dirigibles aloft, retro-tech wonders, and astounding adventure will set clockwork-loving hearts hammering with delight. Longtime steampunk fans: prepare to gleefully grab your goggles to read these remarkable stories! Newcomers: prepare to become fans of this popular genre involving both the past and present?entertainingly and provocatively re-thought, re-invented, and re-evaluated. With stories by K.W. Jeter, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ken Liu, Cherie Priest, Carrie Vaughn, and many others. Full list of contributors: Christopher Barzak; Tobias Buckell; C. S. E. Cooney; Aliette de Bodard; Lisa L. Hannett; Samantha Henderson; K. W. Jeter; Caitlin R. Kiernan; Jay Lake; Ken Liu; Alex Dally MacFarlane; Tony Pi; Cherie Priest; Cat Rambo; Chris Roberson; Margaret Ronald; Sofia Samatar; Gord Sellar; Nisi Shawl; Benjanun Sriduangkaew; E. Caterine Tobler; Genevieve Valentine; Carrie Vaughn; AC Wise; Jonathan Wood. Praise for the author: The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace, focuses on newer elements of steampunk and proudly includes work by Mary Robinette Kowal, Jay Lake, Cat Rambo, Ekaterina Sedia, Catherynne M. Valente, Genevieve Valentine and more. Kirkus Reviews The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, edited by Sean Wallace, includes five original stories (and a large selection of good recent work). All the originals are worthy of attention. Locus World Fantasy Award-winning editor Wallace has compiled an outstanding anthology of thirty stories (including four originals) sure to satisfy even the most jaded steampunk fans and engage newcomers and skeptics. Each story exemplifies steampunk?s knack for critiquing both the past and the present, in a superb anthology that demands rereading. Publishers Weekly, starred review What I liked best about the majority of these short stories was that they?re true to steampunk; no real unusual deviations for those of you looking for goggles and corsets . . . Wired

Release date: September 18, 2014

Publisher: Robinson

Print pages: 512

Sample

What more can one say about steampunk that hasn’t already been said? Apparently, quite a lot. Just when you thought this subgenre was past its sell-by date, this anthology provides compelling evidence that authors can take now-familiar steampunk ideas and concepts and breathe new life into them.

Writers and and readers love steampunk – it allows us to play with and think about history in new and wondrous ways. It lets us trample on old tired beliefs and consider what could be, ponder alternative possibilities. Not only do these tales reimagine history – and therefore our futures – they show you just how wide and broad the theme truly is; simply slapping some clock parts and gears onto a story doesn’t make it steampunk.

E. Catherine Tobler’s “Green-eyed Monsters in the Valley of the Sky, An Opera” (original to this volume) is a perfect example of mixing familiar tropes and creating something marvellously exciting. Who would think you could combine dinosaurs with opera and come up with a steampunk story that takes place largely in an island in the sky and make it work? And let’s throw in some Shakespeare, too, while we’re at it. In addition to the story’s mystery and adventure, there is an underlying theme of love we may not understand until it completely unfolds. As Serafina says: “He has made you into something you were not prepared to be.”

Chris Roberson’s inventive take on the Frankenstein story demonstrates one of the core appeals of a Steampunk tale. As Chabane, laments in “Edison’s Frankenstein”, you can’t escape tradition. However, he also realizes: “Maybe it wasn’t all of the tomorrows that mattered . . . Maybe what was truly important was preserving the past, and working for a better today. Perhaps that was the only real way to choose what kind of future we will inhabit.”

As we mull over how best to choose our future, we are faced with an ongoing, senseless war in Jonathan Wood’s “Anna in the Moonlight”. (Another original to this volume.) This irrational war is brought about because two old friends – both in positions of power – have a disagreement over religion and technology. Aren’t we facing similar challenges today in science vs religion debates? And yet the individual is all but forgotten. “In creating their myth of our times, Lords Simon and Percy, the newspapermen, my fellow historians, have all forgotten something. They have forgotten you and me, the common men and women forced to live in the world they are forging.”

Many great pieces of fiction deal with social issues of the day. And steampunk is a perfect vehicle for this. C. S. E Cooney creates Candletown and explores the difficult circumstances of the mining industry in “The Canary of Candletown”. The mine workers are offered mecha-limbs when they lose theirs or otherwise fall ill, making them even more dependent on the Company. And speaking of better living through technology, Gord Sellar’s story, “The Clockworks of Hanyang”, explores themes of creator/maker and machine. He examines the results of humankind’s arrogance in creation, “. . . their human makers had built them into something worse than slavery: incompletion was the lot of the great mass of mechanika, an incompleteness of development, an utter desolation of each mechanika’s secret potential.” We see more evidence of how the machines we build can turn on us in Cherie Priest’s “Tanglefoot”, when Madeline cautions young Edwin about his mechanical creation and friend Ted: “Keep him close, unless you want him stolen from you – unless you want his clockwork heart replaced with something stranger.”

Nor can steampunk be contained only to the milieu of Victorian England. Indeed, the cables of steampunk stretch far. We discover an Aztec narrative in “Memories in Bronze, Feathers and Blood” from Aliette de Bodard. Ken Liu surprises us with Chinese demon hunters who don’t behave the way one expects in “Good Hunting”, and Nisi Shawl takes us to the Congo with “The Return of Chérie”.

Not all the stories here are cautionary tales. There is no lack of entertaining adventure stories. After all, it is often the sense of adventure, of invention, and even mystery and intrigue that first draws us to steampunk. This anthology rewards even the most well-read steampunk reader with a wealth of satisfying stories. We find adventurers running off to capture ancient, perhaps extraterrestrial, artefacts in Carrie Vaughn’s “Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil”. We hold our breath in anticipation when two old flames reunite in Samantha Henderson’s “Beside Calais”. And we are charmed and delighted by the mechanical crustacean in Margaret Ronald’s “The Governess and the Lobster”.

Steampunk over? Not by a long shot. And this anthology will show you why.

Ann VanderMeer

To be an ambassador meant to face outsiders, and Tia was well prepared for it. There was the overpowered, heavy, high-caliber pistol ever strapped to her right thigh. Sure, it was filigreed with brass and polished wood inlay, a gunsmith’s masterpiece, but it was still able to stop many threats in their tracks. A similarly crafted-but-functional blade swung from her hip. And then there was the flamethrower strapped to her back.

This was not so much for threats, but for contraband and outside material forbidden in the Abyssal City.

Today she’d taken the elevators up the edges of the ravine that split the ground all the way down to the hot, steamy streets a mile below. Overhead, tall, wrought iron arches and glass ceilings spanned the top of the ravine, keeping life-giving air capped in. Up here, near the great airlocks, the air bit at her skin: cold and low enough on oxygen that you sometimes had to stop and pant to catch your breath.

“Ambassador?” the Port Specialist asked, his long red robes swirling around the pair of emergency air tanks he wore on his back, his eyes hidden behind the silvered orbs of his rubber facemask. His voice was muffled and distant. “Are you ready?”

“Proceed,” Tia ordered.

Today they examined the long, segmented iron parts of a train that hissed inside the outer bays. The skin of the mechanical transporter cracked and shifted, readjusting itself to pressurized air. From the platform she stood on, she surveyed the entire length of the quarantined contraption.

It had thundered in, unannounced, on one of the many rails that criss-crossed the rocky, airless void of the planetary crust.

It was a possible threat.

“Time of arrival,” the Port Specialist intoned, and turned his back to her to grab the long levered handles of an Interface set into the wall. He pulled the right handles, pushed in the right pins, and created a card containing that data.

“Length,” Tia called out. She bent her eyes to a small device mounted on the rim of a greening railing. “One quarter of a mile. One main motor unit. Three cabs. No markings. Black outer paint.”

Behind her the Port Specialist clicked and clacked the information into more cards.

A photograph was taken, and the plate shaved down to the same size as the cards and added.

A phonograph was etched into wax of the sound of the idling motor that filled the cavernous bay.

All this information was then put into a canister, which was put into a vacuum tube, which was then sucked into the city’s pipes. “The profile of the visiting machine has been submitted,” intoned the Port Specialist.

“We wait for Society’s judgement,” replied Tia, and pulled up a chair. She sat and looked at the train, wondering what was inside.

The reply came back up the tube fifteen minutes later. The Port Specialist retrieved the card.

“What does Society say?” Tia asked.

“There is a seventy per cent threat level,” the Port Specialist said.

“Time to send them on their way,” Tia said. “I will help you vent the bay.”

But the Port Specialist was shaking his head. “The threat level is high, but the command on the card is to allow the visitors into the sandbox. Full containment protocol.”

Tia groaned. “This is the worst possible timing. I had a party I was supposed to attend.”

The Port Specialist shrugged and checked the straps on his air mask. He tightened them, as if imagining the possible danger of the train to be in the air around him, right this moment. “And I have a family to attend,” he said. “But we have a higher duty right now.”

“I was going to be introduced to my cardmate,” Tia said. The first step in a young woman’s life outside her family home. The great machine had found the person best suited for her to spend the rest of her life with.

It would disappoint her family and her friends that she would be stuck in lockdown in the sandbox with some foreign people waiting to make sure they cleared quarantine.

The Port Specialist handed her the orders. “Verify the orders,” he said.

Tia looked down at the markings, familiar with the patterns and colors after a lifetime of reading in Society Code.

A large chance of danger.

But they were to welcome in this threat.

“Hand me an air mask and a spare bottle,” Tia sighed.

The Port Specialist did so, and Tia buckled them on. She checked the silvered glasses on the eyeholes and patted down her body armor. She put in earplugs, pulled on leather gloves, and then connected a long hose to the base of her special gas mask.

“Hello?” she said. “This is Tia.”

The sounds and sights of what she saw would be communicated back through, and monitored by Port Control, with the aid of a significant part of Society’s processing power. Crankshafts and machinery deep in the lower levels of the city, powered by the steam created from pipes below even that, would apply the city’s hundreds of years of algorithms and calculations to her situation and determine what she would do next.

And Port Control, really someone sitting in a darkened room in front of a series of flashing lights, would relay that to her.

“This is Port Control, you are clear to engage,” came the somewhat muffled reply from the speaking hose.

Tia walked up to the train, stopping occasionally to yank the bulk of the hose along with her, and rapped on the side of the steel door.

Pneumatics hissed and the door scraped open. Tia’s hand was on the butt of her gun as a man, clad in full rubber outer gear and wearing a mask much like hers, stepped forward, a piece of parchment held out before him.

He had a gun on his waist, and his hand on it as well. They approached each other like crabs, cautiously scuttling forward.

Tia snatched the parchment, and they retreated away from each other. She read the parchment by holding it up where she could both read it, one handed, and keep an eye on the other man.

Manifest: three passengers.

Passenger one and two, loyal and vetted citizens of a chasm town two stops up along the track. Affiliation: Chasm Confederation.

Passenger three was an unknown who had ridden down the track from places unknown. Affiliation: unknown.

Tia reported this all back to Port Control.

“Go ahead and let them in,” Port Control said.

Tia nervously waved her assent at the man in rubber, and he turned around and waved the passengers out of the car.

The first two, a husband and wife team with matching gold-plated lifemate cards dangling from their necks, were diplomats. They carried briefcases full of paper network protocols, and rode up and down the rail to pass on packets of information between the cities and towns. They stepped down, the tips of the tails of their bright-red diplomat suits dragging on the ground slightly as they walked past.

Tia bowed to them, somewhat clumsily in her gear.

“What is the threat level?” the male diplomat asked.

“Sandbox,” Tia told him.

With a sigh they walked around her toward the airlock leading out.

The third passenger stepped down.

He had long hair cut to just above his ears and dark eyes partially hidden by wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled a giant trunk with wheels mounted on the corners. A leather-bound notebook dangled from a gold chain looped around his neck, as did a mechanical pen.

With a cautious step forward, he bowed, and then straightened. “My name is Riun,” he announced.

He went to walk around her and follow the diplomats, but then realized he’d let go of his wheeled trunk. He awkwardly turned back for it.

Tia smiled beneath the heavy mask.

The sandbox was a hall that could seat two hundred. The center was dominated by several long tables, while the periphery had cots that folded out from the wall.

By the far end, clear one-way mirrors allowed observers to view the sandbox.

Overhead, large metal balconies allowed Society’s Reporters to look down on the sandbox and constantly file new cards with the machinery of Society, updating the computing machine that ruled them all with all the moves the quarantined made.

Every fifteen minutes the reporters would change shifts, to prevent contamination.

As the diplomats huddled together in the far side of the room, not interested in company, Tia removed her cumbersome protective gear and joined Riun at the table.

“Your city is strict about outside influence,” Riun observed, looking around the sandbox.

“There are murals on the lower alleyways,” Tia said. “Some of the cityfolk believe that during the Ascendance Wars the city’s programs, during the great Downshifting, became somewhat paranoid of outside infection.”

“The Ascendance Wars?” Riun asked, looking puzzled.

Tia stared at him. How much of an outsider was he? Suddenly she thought about the warning, and wondered if maybe Riun was something far more dangerous than she realized.

Should she even be talking to him?

But the machine hadn’t flagged Riun to be separately sandboxed. Nor had Tia been handed any warnings to shun him.

“Were you schooled in your city’s history?” she asked.

He smiled. “Of course. But I am not schooled in yours.”

“The great thinking cities of the world tried to reach for the stars, but fought among each other to reach them first and over control of the skies. The fighting grew so perilous and killed so many people that the machines that ran the cities decided to Downshift. They would only use mechanical technology, slow thought, to run the systems of their cities. The city used to use ‘quantum chips’ but now only uses steam and gears and cards.”

Riun chuckled. “Always different stories.”

“What?”

“I find, from city to city, there are different stories and variations on the stories,” Riun said.

“And what is the story your city tells?” Tia asked loudly, while thinking to herself that surely this was auditory contamination, and why wasn’t the city flagging this conversation yet? Hearing that the city’s histories were false was dangerous.

Wasn’t it?

Then again, Tia realized, she’d only seen the murals or heard tales. She’d never heard the city give an official history.

Riun cleared his throat. “According to the histories of my city, the Downshift came when the great Minds of this world created a shield to save us from a war with the other minds out in the Great Beyond. In order to save us, they banned all methods of information that could be transmitted through the air.”

“And which one do you believe?” Tia asked.

Riun smiled again, large and welcoming. “I think they’re all shards of some older truth we’ve forgotten,” he said. “That’s why I travel the world, listening, gathering, and meeting the citizens of the cities.”

He opened a case of notes and showed her hand-drawn sketches of other cities, other night skies. Handwritten notes of tales, and descriptions of systems.

“Why?” Tia asked. “Why leave your city?”

“Why not?” He shrugged.

The hours dragged on. Food was delivered by chutes, and they ate on the large, empty tables in silence.

Afterward Tia sat and watched Riun read a leather-bound book he pulled out of his large trunk until she couldn’t stand the boredom. “Do you play Gorithms?” she finally asked.

“Of course.”

“There’re several playing stands near the far walls,” she said. “Care to join me?”

They set up on the small playing table, connected the pneumatic tubes, and a few seconds later the dual packs of cards appeared.

Tia unwrapped hers and laid them down with a thwack as Riun delicately laid his out behind the dark glass of his privacy shield.

They looked at each other over the rim of the shields.

“You play?” he asked. She couldn’t see his smile, but the eyes twinkled.

“Always.”

Today’s game was five flowchart sequences with equations, solvable by sub games with the cards. Tia quickly solved her sequences, passed on the marker cards, and looked up.

“You’re quick.”

“Five points,” Riun said. “If my results agree.”

Which they didn’t. One of the sequences tied.

Tia cross-checked with his cards and he rechecked hers. No tie; they came to the same conclusion by playing out the math. Tia was right.

Riun placed the markers in the tube and watched them get sucked away. “You’re quick,” he said. “And accurate.”

“Ninety per cent accuracy rate on simple sub games like that.”

Down in the belly of the beast their results would be tabulated, the result of a low-priority calculation request. Maybe they’d just helped calculate which lights should be left on above some city street. Or regulated the pressure of a valve somewhere. You never really knew. All you knew was that the thousands of games constantly being played helped comprise the total computational capacity of the entire city.

Streets released traffic along paths that helped simulate equations, games were tied into the city’s calculations, and some suspected that even lives had some sort of calculating function, in the cities.

Some Gorithim games were checkerboards, or mazes, or just patterns. You never knew what the tubes would hand you. But playing them was usually fun, if not sometimes puzzling, and it gave you something to do.

Particularly when stuck in the sandbox.

“Another game?” Tia asked.

“I don’t know if I should.” Riun’s eyes crinkled. Was he smiling? “I think your mind is far quicker than mine.”

Tia looked around pointedly. “I’ll be gentle. Besides, do you see anything else you could be doing with your time?”

Riun conceded the point and tapped the delivery button. “Since you promised,” he muttered.

As they waited for the next game to arrive, Tia craned over the shield to get a better look at his whole face. He did have the remains of a smile still. “Tell me about the places you’ve visited,” she suggested.

And Riun began to spin tales of cities perched near cliffs with pipes dug far into the crust of the world to deliver steam, or dug into giant pits, and even one at the top of a tame volcano.

*    *    *

Quarantine broke. Three days of playing Gorithims, eating, and putting up with the diplomats pointedly ignoring them. All the while, the fifteen-minute shift changes of observers continued in the gantries overhead, shuffling in and out to observe them all.

It wasn’t all that unusual for Tia, who enjoyed the gentle rhythm. She’d done several quarantines already. And, to be honest, there were worse people than Riun to get stuck with. He was easy on the eyes, and he could chatter on about the rails he’d traveled, the citypeople he’d met, and the places he’d been. But in a neutral manner, not a boasting one.

She liked that.

When the doors cracked open, Riun excitedly packed his things. “Thank you for the company,” he said, and gave her a half-bow.

“My pleasure.”

And they parted ways, Tia headed for the south switchbacks, threading her way down through the houses clustered on the ravine’s steep walls. Riun would be headed for the guest houses, from where he’d launch a campaign of interviews and his explorations of the new city.

It felt, Tia thought, vaguely treasonous to wonder whether she could submit herself as Riun’s minder to the city while she was getting ready to meet her family and her new cardmate.

At the card ceremony, Tia arrived stripped out of her ambassador’s garb. She now wore her red leathers, with a bustle designed to shove and prod and push her into what her mother called a more pleasing shape, though Tia preferred the comfortable fit of her work clothes. Her hair had been carefully brushed down, and adorned with brass clips.

Here she was, an ambassador, an elite trainee tasked with the city’s defense, and her parents had spent money to have her mate-card bronzed; they were not powerful or rich enough to afford gold. Tia carried it in her gloved hands up the street toward the sub-routines check palace and Gorithims parlor that dominated the nearest intersection.

There, in black leathers and a tie, was her cardmate.

According to the lifelong database kept by the city, her life in punched out rows and marks, this was the unmarried city man with the best statistical chance of making her happy.

Actually, that wasn’t technically true, was it?

No, this pairing was the most statistically valid and most likely to work. There might be someone else better for her, but who wouldn’t be interested in her.

Could she fall in love with this man? He cut a fine figure. Dashing dark hair and large eyes. A certain precision to his movements that spoke of self-control and quickness. Those were qualities she loved in a person.

It was long a tradition to know nothing about your cardmate. Getting to know each other was half the excitement. Who was this person you were matched to by the great city?

That was something to discover.

But did it make her another switch or lever? Was this truly the person she would love, if left alone? Or was this another calculated move by a greater calculation, testing some subroutine?

The two families moved together, their center of focus the two cardmates.

Tia held out her bronzed card. “It says we are most compatible.”

Her cardmate held out his silvered card. “Then let us verify it.”

They put the two cards into a machine, and it whirred and clicked, and then a green light glowed.

Compatible.

“My name is Owyn,” the man said.

“I’m Tia.”

She hung his silvered card around her neck, and he her bronzed card.

It was done.

On the first night, she was expected only to eat a dinner with Owyn. A celebration of a new life that was to slowly bloom. She’d done that, sitting politely in place, and asking after his family. They were a family of silk merchants, and Owyn occasionally rode the rails to other towns and even some cities in order to trade for the city. And normally . . . that would have been fascinating and exotic to her.

Tomorrow there would be a banquet, with dancing and instruments. And on the third day . . .

Well, on the third day, her parents and friends and extended family would walk in a procession down the road, and Owyn’s parents and friends and extended family would do so as well, all carrying possessions to the new couple’s home, where there would be yet another celebration.

And after that, everyone would withdraw, leaving them alone.

It should have been all she was focused on. So why was she wondering how Riun was doing, his first night alone in the city?

Her stomach full of rich food and tea, Tia climbed up on her roof and looked up at the atrium lights far overhead. Somewhere else Riun might be looking back at the same lights, she thought.

And then she swore at herself and climbed down the wrought iron ladder along the side of her parents’ house and sneaked off into the night.

Riun answered the door to the guest houses with a frown. “Tia?”

She slid right past him.

He was puzzled, but offered her tea from a side table and lit some lights. His hair was disheveled, and he wore his nightrobe tied tight around his waist.

They sat in the large foyer near the coolant fans. At night, this close to the city’s lower depths, it grew hot.

“What’s wrong?” Riun asked.

“What makes you think anything’s wrong?” she asked.

“You’re an ambassador, here in the middle of the night.” He looked guarded, and tired. “Should I begin repacking?”

“You’ve done nothing wrong.” She curled up on a small couch and hugged her knees.

“Then why are you here?”

Tia sighed. Typical of men, to miss the obvious and wallow in their own confusion. It was no wonder the great City Minds took to giving out cards that told you who your best match was. “To see you,” she said, a bit more angrily than she’d meant.

And why hadn’t he picked up on that? Or did city women who’d just met him show up at his door at odd hours of the night all the time?

Riun downed the last of his tea and stood. He walked over and sat next to her, and Tia felt a thrill of excitement run through her as the couch shifted from the added weight.

But Riun didn’t look happy. A weary look had replaced what she had hoped was intrigue. He reached over to her neck and held up the silvered card. “That isn’t wise,” he murmured. “I am here at the courtesy of your city, and I will be expelled if I violate that hospitality. Your city has computed the best possible match already for you. I will not endanger that.”

He let go of the card suddenly and pulled his hand back.

For that, she found herself even more interested in him. “You’re right,” she said.

He relaxed, slightly.

But Tia grabbed his hand. “You’re right: you’re an outsider. The city never had a chance to run your profile. Maybe we would have been a good match. But we’ll never know. We could never know. And maybe the city made a mistake. There are mistakes made, that’s why there are error checks.” That’s why every game of Gorithms involved cross-checks for secondary points.

Riun pulled his hand gently away and stood up. “Tia, I’m something new and exciting. An outsider. Maybe even a little scary. Many are attracted. I will not destroy your life on a fancy. I can’t.” He walked to the door.

It was time for her to leave.

At the door she paused, and then looked up at him. “Don’t you get lonely, out there? Traveling those lines by yourself? Don’t you wish you could share those adventures?”

He looked pained. “It is lonely out there, Tia. But few have the courage to truly abandon all they’ve ever known. It sounds exciting, but when it really comes down to it . . . they can’t make that jump.”

He’d been let down in the past.

Tia imagined him watching someone realize what they were doing and rush out of a train at the last second, leaving him alone inside, pulling away.

What would it be like to rip yourself out of the guts of a city for good?

Her father sat in the chair by the entryway playing soligorithm at the family games table. It was odd to see him up this late. He worked an early morning shift at the calculating farms, running numbers on slide rules along with thousands of others.

He set his playing cards aside and held up a red letter. “This woke us up. It came through mail chute. Priority. For you.”

Tia read it. A simple warning, generated somewhere deep inside the city’s bowels, just for her.

It forbade her from seeing Riun for the duration of his stay. Any violation would result in his expulsion.

“Is there a problem?” her father asked.

Tia folded the letter up. “Did you read it?”

“I did.” He looked back down at his cards. “Some of us have had friendships or . . . more, before our cardmates were revealed. People we knew and thought we liked. Over time, you realize you were mistaken. The city is wise.”

“Did you want someone else?” Tia asked.

Her dad turned back to the cards. “Tomorrow is the banquet, Tia. You should focus on that.”

Tia walked up the stairs to her room. In bed she lay down and reread the warning.

It wouldn’t be fair to Riun to get him expelled because of her own confusion. He was a traveler, an explorer of new cities. She wouldn’t rip this one from him, she decided.

Her cardmate sat across from her, partially hidden behind a staggering assortment of elaborate cakes, pots of loose teas, coffees, and fancy aerated drinks.

It seemed like half her street had boiled out of their multi-storied tenements bolted to the sides of the beginning of the ravine’s steep climb to celebrate.

And Tia found herself forcing her smile.

One of her aunts patted her shoulder sympathetically. “It gets better,” she whispered. “Give it time. All of us are in shock at first. It’s okay.”

So apparently her smile was not very believable.

Later into the night Owyn found her, trying to hide behind a flower display.

“Are you feeling well?” he asked hesitantly.

“Everything is fine,” Tia insisted.

Owyn stood awkwardly by her, then finally nodded and walked away. Tia sighed. He looked crushed and frustrated. And none of this was really his fault, was it?

Neither of them left the banquet happy. When Tia got home she just sat in the middle of her room, frustrated and getting angrier.

Her dad knocked and entered the room. “We have a problem,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Tia said, looking down at the carpet on her floor. “The city provides. It calculates the best outcomes for us. We have jobs we are engaged with. Lives that are often fulfilling. And I know that Owyn is a good choice. I’m struggling, but I think I’ll get through.”

“Your aunt just sent a runner, he’s at the door. She says a quarantine order has been issued for you.” Her dad squatted down in front of her. “What have you