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

She turned away, into the trees, toward the wall. He caught her in a quick, hard grip. “You do, don’t you? You think can go spying on whoever, and nobody’s gonna stop you.”

“No…” she said, wriggling loose, “and I don’t have to talk to you.” Because you don’t matter, because I’m going to Sant Ramon to be Ramona’s assistant.

“Don’t move, maggot.”

She got ready to make a run for the wall, but Aiden’s grip found her throat and squeezed. “You’re gonna die, you know that?” His voice was close and dangerous. “You’re gonna die, and nobody’s going to care. Nobody. And you know why?”

“Why?” Kora choked out, before she swung the stick at Aiden’s head, hard enough to make him let go. He wrenched it away from her with an angry howl, but she was off and running through the trees.

Aiden was fast, thundering after her, swinging the stick all the way. Thwack, thwack, thwack, thwack.

But she was faster, and she reached the wall before him. She wouldn’t lead Aiden Averback to her secret entrance. So she disappeared up another tree as he came crashing through. He looked around, too stupid and angry to look straight up. He snorted, threw down the stick, and went away.

She’d find something of his to burn, later.

Kora climbed down from the tree, shivering fiercely, dropping to her knees to find the top of the manhole. Right at the wall, under dirt and leaves, the cracked concrete slab was just as she’d left it. It was heavy, but so was she, and strong. She uncovered the manhole, wedged the stick in place, and slipped down into her own special, silent darkness.

The steam-tunnels were the only place where she was ever really warm.

She wouldn’t throw away her pictures just yet, she decided. She might need them after all. She’d move them to some deeper, darker spot until everyone forgot about them.

For now, she took out a pencil and wrote out as best she could, in the corner of one picture whose tentacles didn’t coil quite to the edge of the page, all the things she learned that day:

Kora Gillespie is not a demi-god.

She is malicious.

She is a night-crawler.

Kora put a star, so she’d remember to look up what malicious meant.

Then she sat down, and breathed in the thick, blanketing air, until she was sure the bells had already rung for dinner.

There was no trial period, no transition, not even a full day’s grace. By the next afternoon, the Cambion girl sat smack in the front row of Ramona’s Immaculate Conception and Gestation class, grinning like she’d won. And from that minute on, there was no avoiding her.

With the rapidity of a wasp, Kora found her way to the center of every single classroom’s attention and nested there.

She never did anything openly anarchic, but the atmosphere was the same as if she started a trash can fire at the beginning of every lecture. She sat with such scarily unblinking attention, and scribbled with such composer-like intensity, that she could dissolve a class into nervous, murmuring giggles without saying anything at all.

Once she grew bold enough to ask questions, all was lost.

Sometimes she semi-automaticked them, not even bothering to put her hand all the way down between rounds. “Ramona, is that a picture of a real faun fetus or half-faun, like Aiden Averback? Can I hold it? Can you make it bigger? Can I make it bigger? Ramona, do the horns hurt when they come out? No, not out of his head, out of the mama’s vagina? What if it’s a girl, and she has curly ones?”

The dull roar that built up behind these solid walls of questions could never be kept back until the class was over. And the class was instantly over once it started.

“Kora,” Ramona managed one day after a particularly unsuccessful lab. “I think it would be best if you reserved your questions for after class.”

“But I raise my hand.”

“Adult students with too many questions have to keep quiet during class time, and ask their questions later, during office hours.”

“Oh,” she said, eyes shining with the dangerous knowledge. “Okay.”

From that day forward, Kora Gillespie was as silent as she could be in the classroom. But in the halls and cloisters between classes, she was an unrelenting storm of chatter, as close on Ramona’s heels as an overexcited duckling. Office hours were now entirely taken up by the seven-year-old’s undauntedly one-sided conversation. Twice, the Cambion followed her straight back to graduate housing and up into her living room without even a pause.

But Ramona had already determined that she would make herself too busy to annoy, burrowing deep into the work of constructing her Sant Ramon program design. Even Kora could be ignored, if you typed feverishly enough.

It was a plan that worked wonderfully well, until the dreams started.

Kora Gillespie was seeping into her dreams. She wasn’t having dreams about Kora Gillespie. Kora Gillespie was walking around in her dreams.

She’d emerge from the very back of the closet in a kissing dream decades old. Or she’d be looking over Ramona’s shoulder while Ramona answered the essay portion of a dream-exam in gibberish. Or she’d be hovering above Ramona as Ramona fell backward into dream-blackness, a pale, thin, inscrutable, smirking face, just before she started awake in bed.

It was almost certainly some kind of inheritance from the thing that was her father, this casual strolling in and out of dreams. If it hadn’t been happening to her, Ramona might have called it interesting, and taken notes. But almost every night, she woke feeling that the ghost-white girl was standing just in her blind spot, or that she was just in the other room getting ready to make something burn.

Ramona never confronted her invader. She had a vague, belligerent idea that if she didn’t acknowledge the game, the fun of tromping all over her brain would more quickly dissipate. But she now was hyper-aware of the girl. Her every breath, and greasy fingerprint, and shuffling step, and stupid question.

“Why don’t I look like anything?” Kora asked inanely one day.

“ Look like anything?”

“The other Superum kids all have tails and scales and horns and things like their dads.”

“You’re fortunate not to look like your father, Kora,” said Ramona irritably.

“But maybe if I did, it would be a nice surprise when I talked,” she said, though Ramona had stopped listening.

Ramona had the nightmare one night after a bottle of wine. It was the usual nightmare, certainly nothing more than usual. She was back in that darkened walk-up in Washington Heights, listening to Ms. Gillespie scream.

She stood by herself—no Bernadette in sight—staring down into the dark passage from which she knew the thing was coming. And Ms. Gillespie arched and screamed, raking her nails across her skin, begging with those now-familiar fear-clouded eyes. Stop It! Please stop It! Please take It from me!

We fight the fear, dear, that’s what we do . Ramona would always have Bernadette’s words in her head, but never in her mouth. I can’t! she’d say instead, her voice thin and high and horrible, It’s coming already, I can’t!

And then Ms. Gillespie would roll her eyes up to the ceiling, screaming blindly, almost unconscious. And so Ramona was left by herself to catch the baby when It came bursting out.

But all that came bursting out was black blood, pouring out and pouring out over everything; her hands and arms, the bedsheets, the floor, an amniotic flood that showed no signs of stopping. Had she lost It? Was there any real baby at all? Was it all just a trick of pain and terror and this poisoned blood?