SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

His voice, when he found it, was gentle. “Put that bottle up where you found it.”

Samuel put everything away and closed the cupboard door. Edward stood, his heart lightened with possibilities. With hope. He pictured Simone ruffling the boy’s hair and felt an urge to do the same.

“Let’s see about having a note sent ‘round to Miss Simone, shall we?”

First published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 30 (May, 2014), edited by Dave Wolverton

A breeze caught at the blades of the windmill, producing a groan of protest from the hub. Amba glanced up at the weathered shaft and cracked wooden blades, both unlikely to see repairs with the well nearly dry. Above the windmill, a great sheet of heat lightning crackled purple and yellow across the dark sky; the sky that promised rain every day as if unaware that it had no moisture left to give.

Looking anywhere except to the fields, Amba returned to poking the ground with the point of her copper herding rod. Eventually, the vastness of the land drew her eyes across the acres of dirt, flat and featureless, punctuated only by the containment poles.

The ship was there, closer each day. Its sails billowed and the great wooden hull heaved on invisible waves that rolled between the ship’s dry keel and the dirt of the farm. It had advanced nearly to the top of the second field, the one where the grubs matured into young sparkers. By tomorrow the ship would be in the first field.

It was no use running for Father. She had done that when it first appeared as a speck on the horizon, at the waning of the last moon. Father had seen nothing. The speck had grown steadily larger, and still he had taken no notice. By the time the Wind Moon was waxing, the sails and the hull had been distinguishable and she had pointed it out again. He’d stared unseeing and unbelieving at the horizon, then grunted and turned away.

He never mentioned it afterward; never said if he thought she was lying or teasing or, worse, hallucinating, as she had during her illness. If it concerned him, he fostered it in silence, as he did all his worries.

Amba had worked hard to take over her brother’s duties in the fields after Jass died. Her father did his best to accept her as a surrogate, but telling him that a ship he couldn’t see was sailing over their fields threatened her fragile progress with him. She had resolved not to mention it to him again, no matter what.

The ship was close enough now that she could see men on the deck and details of the figurehead: a body, an upraised arm holding something. She wondered if the ship would sail right up to the house, or through the house. She wondered if she would drown when the unseen ocean washed over her.

Mustering her resolve to walk into the field, she went first to the corral to collect her mallet, then scanned the dirt in the top field until she spotted a ripple in the soil. Approaching the disturbance, she tapped her slender rod into the ground just behind it. The ripple surged away from her. Father said the copper tasted as bitter to sparkers as immature haza beans tasted to Amba.

She pulled the rod from the ground and tapped it in again at a safe distance behind the sparker. Mature sparkers were the most dangerous. Even with the herding rod’s leather grip, they could give a nasty jolt if she came too close. Zigzagging with the erratic path the creature took, she herded it toward the opening in the small circle of poles that made up the corral. Once the sparker entered, she jammed her herding rod into the ground and hurried to replace the missing containment pole before the sparker wriggled out again.

I have one ready,” she told Father when she found him in the shed, already changed into his heavily padded harvesting clothes. His only reply was to bend and take one handle of the glass cage. She lifted the other side of the container and together they carried it to the corral.

Her father’s quiet manner had been peaceful and comforting when Amba was young, but after the fever killed Mother he had become more distant than quiet. When Jass died, her father had withdrawn further still. Amba wished that she knew how to find the old him, wherever he had gone, and help him find his way back. She needed him. She was broken in her own way, with an emptiness since her illness, since Mother’s death, that had never filled up again. It ached sometimes, in the hollow just below her breastbone.

They reached the corral and set the cage down. Amba braced herself to watch Father harvest. She hadn’t been there when Jass died, but she had seen him afterward, his eyes frozen wide with pain, the burnt and flaking skin that she had scrubbed from his chest and hands before they buried him.

Her father was slipping on his heavy gloves when she turned suddenly at the sound of a deep voice shouting behind her. For a moment, she had forgotten about the ship. A large man stood at the wheel and the men on deck scurried to follow some order. The ship was too far away to make out what he’d said, though he had raised his voice, as if over the roar of wind and waves.

Amba turned back to find her father staring at her. She flushed under his silent, probing gaze. He held her eyes for a long moment—not searching for clues to her thoughts—but looking at them, studying the clouds in the dark brown of her irises. The clouds that the fever had left behind. His brow furrowed in concern before he turned, wordlessly, and stepped into the corral.

Amba hurried to push the cage against the containment poles to make up for her lapse. She stood well back, holding the heavy glass lid ready. Her father moved around the edge of the corral, staying close to the safety of the poles. He pushed his hooked rod into the ground and angled it to tease the sparker from the soil. When the back of the creature broke the surface, he swept the rod deftly under its twisting body.

Once wrenched from the soil they were ugly things—grayish-brown, like giant eyeless slugs, but with nublike tails and a multitude of tiny legs that propelled them through the soil. This one was a monster, as long and as thick around as her thigh, its many legs clawing at the air.

If any of the spines on those legs connected with her father’s clothing, the sparker would cling to him, charring his skin and stopping his heart. Father kept the sparker well away from him, though, and in one smooth motion slipped it between the poles and into the glass container. Amba quickly slid the top into place.

The creature thrashed against the dry glass of its confines, sparking like a mirror image of the heat lightning flashing in the sky. Those sparks lit lamps and powered the great wheels and fans in town, though water and food were what made them most valuable. Bereft of soil to soothe it, the sparker began to secrete water into the container even as Amba and her father carried it back to the shed.

They harvested the remainder of the mature sparkers all the rest of that day. Amba tried to ignore the ship sailing ever closer as she worked, though she stole quick glances at it when Father wasn’t watching.

By evening, the first field was cleared, and she felt exhausted. Father went to the shed and set up the siphons that would keep the sparkers from drowning in their own water while Amba headed for the house to clean up and begin supper.

Do you think there’s still an ocean?” she asked him that evening as they ate. Sparkers tasted like snails and were tough, even when stewed all day, but at least they were plentiful.

His eyes narrowed briefly, no doubt wondering why she asked. She had tried to be subtle—everyone thought about water after all—but the ship was foremost in her thoughts. She chewed a crust of bread and lowered her eyes so that he wouldn’t be reminded of the clouds there.