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

The doll was delivered by Rosie’s own hands—with the assistance of Theo’s and Aiden’s—to the infamous house of mirrors a few days later, two weeks, in an elaborate box remade from a white coffin. It was life-sized, as expected, as ordered, and wrapped in white tissue paper, thin as the wings of a cabbage butterfly.

It was brighter than usual inside the living room, and the lady awaited her small entourage standing by the nearly opaque white curtains, wrapped in a floral shawl. She looked over at the box, but didn’t let her face fall into any show of emotion.

“Do you bring me a dead man, Miss?”

Rosie felt like laughing, but Theo caught her eye—and he didn’t seem at all amused.

“I will explain everything once my helpers leave, ma’am.”

Helpers. The word seemed to linger over Theo’s shoulders, dripping like acid rain from his wavy hair. “Fine.” He gave the lady a small bow, she nodded in his direction, and then he was gone, with only Aiden and a slight suggestion of anger on his trail.

They were alone. Just the two of them, women from different walks of life, two different types of criminal. The mastermind and the wrecking ball. The wizard—perhaps the witch?—and the dragon. The lady walked forward, and Rosie half expected to hear killer heels on the floor boards, but no—she was barefoot, and her toenails were painted the same bloody shade as her finger nails.

“Shall we unwrap it, then?”

“Of course.” First the locks on the side of the coffin, then the layers and layers of tissue paper. It wasn’t a boy, that time, but a girl. A girl with long black hair that fell straight around her shoulders, small breasts and protruding hipbones. She—it, perhaps—came clothed in a two piece black suit, the jacket long and the neckline deep, deep enough to reveal the Y-shaped, hand-stitched incision that marred her chest. Rosie was willing to admit defeat for how much she looked like Max, if only in the proud features—but when she sat up, after a little coaxing from Rosie’s part, she even seemed to move like him. Cautious, but full of unused potential. Built for carnage, first, and for love, later. Rosie helped her up and out of the box, careful not to strain muscles cold from lying in a tight space for too long. Her eyes were empty—they couldn’t be emptier if Rosie had pulled them out of their sockets and replaced them with glass spheres.

“Does it have a name, Miss V?”

“I haven’t named her, ma’am. I was expecting you would want to do it yourself.”

The lady stepped closer, blew into the doll’s eye. She blinked.

“Should it do that?”

Rosie had kept her fingers crossed. Hoped the lady wouldn’t ask questions she could not answer, because the answers had come while she’d been too artificially dazed, somewhere between Theo’s and Max’s apartments, to remember to take notes.

“She…. I mean, it…. Forgive me, ma’am…” She wasn’t yet good at extracting the humanity from the parts, from the skin and bone and skull and lips of the human who stood just inches from her, a face and body framed in black, tarnished only by a Y-shaped scar over the chest. “The shell is very much human. If you touch h- it, you will realize the skin feels warm, like a human’s would. The shell is human, and it works like a human’s, which means there will be some needs you will need to attend to. Think of it as recharging your companion—perpetual motion is still very much beyond my skill set.”

“How does this creature you offer me differ from a human, then?”

Rosie reached out, and touched the doll. Touched her , not it, running a finger upwards over the stitches. “It’s different here.” She let the finger rest on the doll’s forehead. “And here. The shell is human. The rest is as empty as it looks. And it’s yours to change, and create, and improve as you see fit. I’m sure it will suit your needs. Any changes you feel like making, on the outside or the inside, I will be more than happy to take care of.”

“Anything else I should know?”

No. No, most definitely not.

There was, after all, method to what others saw only as Rosie’s madness—but she had no interest in showing it to them.

The stitches came out ten days later. The doll served tea. Her name was Gemma, and she moved with the trained delicacy of a creature conscious of eyes lingering over her figure every second of the day, and probably the night.

You lied. -G

The note was simple, and it arrived four days later written in golden ink over pale pink, thick paper with a vague scent of roses. It deviated from every other note simply in the fact that it reached the shop tied to a box, a white box with gold locks filled with white tissue paper, thin as the wings of a cabbage butterfly. Inside, a kitchen knife, tainted red, and a bundle of paper stained just as dark.

She unwrapped it, and found someone’s heart in her hands.

Apex Magazine, Issue 79, and Best of Apex Magazine Volume 1

Chancery hissed at the sudden pain of a splinter in her palm. She took a deep breath filled with the scent of dust and woodsap, and exhaled the hurt as steam to dissipate in the cold air.

"See? She’s people ," Hedron said. " People are a distraction. They always spoil everything, given a chance. You mustn’t give them one." He bared his tiny, needle-sharp teeth, a distant storm glimmering behind his moonstone eyes.

"Kay’s not people ," Chancery said. "How do you know she’s coming, anyway? You promised you’d stay away from the harbour." She put the dropped log on the stack at the back of the shed and pulled the splinter out with her teeth. It tasted of resin and woodlice.

Hedron took her hand and kissed it better. Spores cried like fading ghostly mice as they died.

"I promised I wouldn’t go inside the fence and I haven’t," he said. "One of ours was wandering along the road by the compound, and Kay was talking to the site manager just inside the gate."

He perched on the tree stump Chancery used as a platform for splitting the logs and ran fingers like knobbly twigs around the brim of his hat.

Chancery didn’t like his hat. It was too big and sagged over his head in a floppy, shapeless mass of purple felt attracting dust, cobwebs, fluff, and stray hairs. Once a week or so, he went away for a few hours and came back with it clean. It stayed clean for a day or two at the most. He’d warned her not to touch. She wouldn’t have tried anyway; looking at it made her bones restless and itchy.

He rubbed his fingertips together, sniffing them. They squeaked like soaped glass. A twist of hair fell from the hat and he herded it back with a cupped hand. "She brought chocolate." He offered no explanation as to how he knew this, but all their people had his eyes and ears. He told them what to do.

"Will she visit?"

"Would the Oilers care about cocoa content?"

"No."

"Then she’ll be here tomorrow."

It had been a year since Kay’s last visit, a year since the fight. Chancery couldn’t manage the monthly trade with the Oilers without Hedron telling her what to say, and they didn’t matter much. They were just people , interchangeable.

Kay wasn’t.

Chancery’s vision swum with panic. What if she said the wrong thing?

"She’s not worth getting in a state over," Hedron said. "Think of all the things you could do with that chocolate." He stretched out his long, spider-thin legs and leaned back, lacing his hands behind his head. Dust spilled from his hat and returned as if it were sheep separated from a flock.