Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

But: Tasé .

She takes a step forward, two, hoping he understands it. She takes another step. The wind comes behind her, but she steps forward again, buying time, reminding herself she can do better, be better. Her Mam tried, but she can try harder.

Please, please, she thinks, watching him, static between the two sentries. Please.

And as if he hears her, at the very instant she starts to feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand in response to the crackle of the wind, Tasé moves. He slips, lithe, darting, the sentries too shocked by everything to react properly. He ditches his top cloak as he speeds across the sand, his skin black and melding with the night. His father, the Chief, follows, lumbering along, screaming his name, the fires of the sentries bobbing alongside him.

Yes, Nata thinks. Yes.

The whirlwind of time, of gods, of opportunity, of liberation, leans down right then and embraces her. Sand fills her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her ears. Her skin tingles softly, and she feels her feet leaving the ground.

But she sticks out an arm all the same.

It feels like ages, and like a faraway thing, when a sandy hand grasps hers. She pulls—to herself, to the Mams who dared to leave before, to the future, to power.

They rise, together. She knows it is together because she knows the weight of defiance. She offers herself to the wind and they slip, slip, losing all sense of time and space. They become nothing and everything, and all is possible in the breath of the gods, a breath that is now theirs to breathe. Wherever it would take them, they do not know, but at least one thing is sure: that their tongues and their bodies and their hearts will belong to them.

Tegan Moore (alarmhat.com) is a writer and professional dog trainer living in the Pacific Northwest. She enjoys eating noodles, hiking in the rain, and reading scary stories. She has published short fiction in magazines including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s , and Tor.com and runs the Clarion West One-Day Workshops. You can follow her obscenely charismatic dogs @temerity.dogs on Instagram.

I am a good dog.

The scent trails are already as broken by the wind as the apocalyptic neighborhoods they lead through, and smoke from a fire half a mile southeast adds another layer of complexity. Following one trail is like following the roots of a plant wound tight together in the dirt.

No, better: It is like sorting through the fallen trees after this storm. Difficult to tell where one tree begins and the other ends, what belongs to what, and where the different parts are from.

That’s a very good Is Like. I save it to keep it with my other good ones.

The sector clear, I send the final readings back to Carol via DAT. She’s behind me with the field assistant, standing on the hood of a car. I can hear the distant, quiet tick of her DAT receipt.

“Sera,” she calls out, “slow down and stay within my visual range.”

Carol should hurry and follow me per standard procedure instead of yelling from the hood of a wrecked car. I don’t have time to wait for her.

Barometric pressure dropping, I ping back to her DAT. I see her hand touch the receiver in her ear from the corner of my eye as I trace the foundation where a prefabricated house once stood. Significant enough to indicate further storms approaching. “Sera,” my DAT says, but I also hear Carol’s voice carry over the rubble field of tangled two-by-four framing, shingles peeled from rooftops, tatters of furniture, and twisted textiles. She struggles down from the car into the wreckage. “Stay in range, goddamn it. Slow down!”

Carol is now too far away to direct or even accompany my search. I don’t need her direction, but the more distance between us, the greater the chance of a missed opportunity. She is slow, perhaps deliberately slow. What does that indicate? Will this also negatively impact the speed at which she acknowledges my alert?

I jump up on an intact retaining wall where I can catch the breeze’s fresh edge. From here it’s easier to see the destruction for what it was before the storm: broken stumps where dogs might have lifted their legs, sidewalks where bicycles and skateboards ruckled along, driveways. Here and there a few houses stand, debris piled at their foundations. In a few days those piles will become a haven for rats and mice. In the distance there are a few humans, nontargets I’ve already cleared from my cache. People who lived here, who now pick through the storm’s detritus. I want to give them an Is Like , but there’s no time. I am working. My priority is to do the best job possible.

I turn my nose to the wind.

The cool air that sucks past the moisture in my nostrils is busy with stories, directions, convoluted half-finished conversations. My vision fuzzes out, becomes irrelevant. Sound snaps through here and there, but I am thinking now with my olfactory bulb:

Broken power line burn reaching this way fitfully due to unpredictable wind pattern shifts

Torn sod broken grass wet turned soil chemicals down further raw sewage must be septic systems in some of these prefab units but trapped not seeping yet

Old human-trails anxiety adrenaline panic the lingering scent of cadaver which has been removed not my target

Broken concrete split shredded pine timber sodden plywood soaked furniture batting

Burst of char as the burn kicks up on the wind then turns back in on itself

The detritus of wind distance age broken-down-ness places happenings irrelevant

Girl

North very faint filtered through quite a bit of green sap fresh branches downed trees but

I ping Carol. Interest. Mark location, north northwest. I take another deep suck of air through my nose to confirm. This way.

“Wait for support.” Even over the DAT, Carol sounds out of breath.

I can’t wait. I need to do my job. Carol and Devin the field assistant can find me via the DAT’s GPS. I must follow this hint of Girl.

Through a hedge and I’ve already lost the scent, but in a moment a memory of Girl passes on the air, and my head turns toward the smell so rapidly it tweaks a muscle in my neck before my body can follow. I am moving as quickly as my nose will allow, every step picked out for me by the scent and what it says I should do.

The world fades to almost nothing, just my nose and the scent and stimulus-response, until a semi looses a roar from twenty meters away and jerks me back into audio/visual.

I have been following cyclone fencing along a housing development’s edge. The storm has punched through the fence in places, and beyond the openings, cars on the interstate are slowing to gawk at the damage. The semi honks again, trapped behind the slowdown.

Its bellow makes me think about Mack and the way his hot dark blood stank as it spread against the asphalt. I remember feeling in my skin and muscles that I would very much like to roll in that smell. A dog’s instinct. I should not have stopped to look at him when it happened, but I needed confirmation he was dead.

Irrelevant to my current search. I shake my head to clear wind-driven grit from my eyes and turn into the current again, reaching. I ping Carol my location—a reminder only, she knows how to find me—then hunt the wind.

It is still there, but its story is conflicted; the stream of its path, eddies and pools and lines all broken by the weather, a puzzle of color and feel. Perhaps a human with a computer might be able to map parts of the puzzle out. But time and movement have danced and shivered and jolted and coughed these trails out of the human spectrum of sense.