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

The man on the other end paused, and went pale. “One moment. Don’t do anything. One moment.”

“Don’t take too long, now.”

The man disappeared for what seemed like a very long time. Margo wiggled against her ropes so that at the very least her wrists would have rope marks on them.

The man reappeared. “We need to see her before anything can be discussed.”

“You know we have her,” said Rumer. “She’s got a chip. We found it. Would you like to learn how?”

The man set his mouth, calmly obstinate. “If you want to move forward, put her on the com, and let me speak to her.”

“Assholes,” Margo muttered. “I could be dying right now.” But she whipped up some shuddering breaths and let Rumer throw her against the terminal.

“Please!” she screamed. “Please it’s me! Tell my mother it’s me!” She didn’t know the man on the com, and she hoped he knew her only by sight.

“Calm down. Calm down, now. You’re going to be all right. Who are these men? What are they doing to you?”

Rumer piped in loudly. “Wrong question, G-man.” Margo winced as though he’d tightened the ropes.

“I don’t know who they are, they never take off the sacks,” said Margo, feeling the blood pound in her ears. “They boarded our ship, and they… everyone …so they took a bunch of stuff, and they took me. They want money. That’s all they want, and then they’ll let me go. Tell my mom…seventy-five thousand. In credits. Tell her.”

“Alright,” said the man. “Alright, we’ll tell her, Miss, stay calm. We’re doing everything we can.” The man shifted to try to get another look at Rumer, just out of frame, and then disappeared.

“We should’ve asked for more,” muttered Kell.

“You should’ve roughed me up,” said Margo.

“Shut up, children,” said Rumer.

The com crackled in the silence, picking up no conversation on the other end.

“He’s not goin’ for it.” Kell rubbed his eye. “We should’ve asked for a lot more. No one lets a piece like her go for under ninety thousand.”

“Oh, they’ll round it up to a nice even hundred for us when they put it to the secretary.” Rumer didn’t take his eyes from the screen. “They wouldn’t go for this if they couldn’t take something off the top.”

“And this way, they’ll think it was their idea,” said Margo proudly.

Kell scowled at her.

The man on the com returned. “We’ve spoken to Secretary Glass. She’ll pay. Clear your bridge. We’ll send someone over shortly to make the trade.”

Margo swallowed the bile in her throat. “NO!…no, you can’t. If you send someone over here, they’ll kill me! I don’t want to die, please, don’t make me die!” It surprised her how easily the whimpering came from her throat.

“Calm down, Miss. Miss? Please calm down.” The man seemed more rattled by her hysterics than by the situation itself. “What does he want us to do?”

“You have to send the credits directly using the ship’s AT, and then they’ll send me in the shuttle. That’s what he says. Just do what he says. Please!”

Then the com-link cut out, and the screen went blank.

“What happened?” asked Margo.

“Backworld machinery,” said Rumer.

“Did he even hear the last thing I said?”

“Who knows?”

They were all silent, listening for sounds of being boarded, for the click-snap of metal weapons and the thunder of boots.

“I’m gonna throw up,” said Margo airlessly.

“Do me a favor,” said Rumer, “save it ‘til they come for me.”

And then there was a disused buzzer that sounded, somewhere, a quick “ping,” short and loud. Everyone turned.

“Credits,” said Diallo. He aimed his grin at Margo.

Margo laughed a sob.

There were no goodbyes, exactly. Just nervous half-slaps and grumbles. Kell rubbed his eye at her an absurd number of times.

It was the captain who strapped her in.

“Well, that’s just about it,” said Pilgrim Pilgrim. “Gone over all the controls?”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said.

“You got your story straight? What you’re gonna tell them?”

“I have a few stories to tell them.”

“They’re not gonna want to hear ‘em all.”

“That’s my problem, not yours. Go deliver what you have to deliver, let me get off this ugly ass ship, for the love of God.”

She knew she’d made Rumer laugh, though she didn’t stay to listen to it. Instead, Margo darted off into the black, and prepared for what she would do when she landed. She’d have to give up the true tale soon enough, tell people there had been no kidnapping, that she was perfectly well.

First, though, she would have a servitor run a bath, and actually get in it.

Originally published by Unlikely Story in their issue The Journal of Unlikely Academia

The night that Kora Gillespie, their Incubus Parvulus, was born, it was Bernadette who received the emergency house call to the walk-up in Washington Heights.

Ramona knew that she should never have come with her. They both knew it. But Ramona had been giddy with courage, full of imaginary clinical detachment, and Bernadette had been in too fierce a hurry to object when she tagged along behind.

There had been no discussion of what she would see when she got there.

At nineteen, a second-year student with hands that still shook, and eyes that still glistened when a mother began to crown, Ramona stood in the choking summer darkness and watched the Cambion emerge.

She would never forget how Ms. Gillespie screamed into the silence, screamed and screamed and screamed. Her screams were thin and high, without grunts, without pauses for breath, coming out wild and alien over Bernadette’s impossibly steady voice: “Calm, now. Breathe for me, now, child. You breathe…”

But there was no making her breathe. The woman’s back formed a perfect arch of terror and pain with every contraction, as she pulled away instead of pushed. And every time a contraction left her, she fell back to trying to wriggle out of the bed—as though she could leave behind the thing emerging from her body—making lakes of inky amniotic fluid on the floor as she collapsed, and was dragged back. “We fight the fear, dear, yes that’s what we do.”

As Ms. Gillespie crowned, Ramona clasped the woman’s hands to stop her tearing at her belly. With terror-clouded eyes, the woman begged them to take it from her, now, please, now. NOW. And then she went into an arch that folded her in half, screaming and beating her head against the headboard until she bled. She seemed unconscious when the baby finally spurted from her in a pool of black blood.

But when Bernadette brought it to her, wrapped in a clean pale cotton blanket, she came awake again. Like the middle of a nightmare, she shrieked a suffocated shriek toward the ceiling, arms flying up as though the baby’s father were there on top of her, suckers fast attached (and still, long years later, whenever Ramona had the nightmares, her brain seemed to insert the creature seamlessly, as though she could never quite believe it hadn’t been there, watching).

Ms. Gillespie sat upright, still screaming, and threw the blood-black sheet over the baby’s face. Before Bernadette could stop her, she leapt free of the bed and tore out of the window, her womb still raw and open. Whether she climbed or fell down the fire escape, Ramona never saw.

Bernadette moved quickly. She never seemed to encounter anything she did not expect. She took up the Cambion, tightened its swaddling, jiggled it a little to stop its soundless crying, and passed it to Ramona like a parcel. “Hold her steady,” she said, business-like, “the girls like steady hands.” Even back then, Bernadette only ever spoke to Ramona in essential facts. In requirements, as though that was all there was.