Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

The walls were decorated with framed NASA photographs: the earth from geosynchronous orbit; the Mars Pathfinder on the ancient floodplain of Ares Vallis; the International Space Station. Icons of a lost age. Was the ISS still in orbit, Theo wondered, or had it come plummeting down through the atmosphere, to impact, perhaps, on a newly medievalized Europe or Japan, startling the serfs and the samurai?

Melissa had done the cooking, had cadged together the ingredients for chicken pasta with tequila cream sauce and a side salad of field greens, candied walnuts and gorgonzola. It was incredible, like everything she set her mind to, remarkable; she must have been striking bargains all over town, even after logging in her own full day on Jeff’s grand mechanism, his Infernal Device.

Theo savored every bite, filled with gratitude…all the while knowing that Melissa had offered up this delectable sacrifice to Jeff, with Theo himself merely a collateral beneficiary, a side effect.

As with so many of their meals together, Theo recognized that, for himself at least, sour grapes was invariably on the menu.

He willed himself to let it go, as much as he could. In this life, the road went a whole lot smoother if you resigned yourself to what was rather than what you’d like it to be, or supposed it should be.

Particularly since the Change had locked its jaws on the planet. A whole hell of a lot came down that you had precious little say in: where you’d live; what you’d do….

Even whether you’d be human or not.

That’s when it really counted who your friends were.

Theo looked about at Melissa and Jeff, and reflected that it wasn’t such a bad bargain after all, compared to what might have been, what he might have become.

He shuddered, remembering the convulsive curvature of his spine that been mere terrifying preamble, just as Melissa no doubt recalled her fevers, her lightening body.

If Theo reached behind his neck, he could feel the small lump where Arcott had sutured a garnet into a pocket of his skin. Melissa, he knew, possessed a similar lump.

Of all those resident in town when calamity had struck, only they two had been granted reprieve, Jeff’s godly dispensation. Of the rest, the luckless ones, the glowing changelings siphoned away by the Storm, the disfigured wretches condemned to hide in shadow and belowground, Jeff hadn’t lifted a finger to avert their fate.

He rescued us because we were his friends. And so we remain his friends.

Or perhaps it was merely because he’d had continuing need of them….

Jeff himself had required no such intervention. He had remained resolutely unchanged, utterly human-at least, as human as he’d been to begin with; incandescent, elusive, cryptic.

How had he known to perform this service upon them? The same way he had known to reelectrify the town, to mount this blazing fresh project that now consumed all three of them. Like everything with Jeff, it stemmed from his brilliance…and from the secrets borne to him on the night winds.

Melissa had been talking about the visitors. “I don’t know,” she said, sighing. “They seem like good people, but this Griffin guy definitely has an agenda, and he’s being cagey about his ultimate goals.”

Jeff Arcott swirled his glass of wine thoughtfully.

“They make a good argument, though,” Theo said. “I talked to the woman, Colleen. Her attitude is, we have this new tech, why don’t we share it?”

“And what did you tell her?” Jeff inquired.

“That it’s all luck and trial-and-error, and we don’t even pretend to understand it ourselves.”

“That’s good,” Arcott said. “It’s even true, more or less.”

“It felt like a lie.”

“What would you have us tell them?”

“Everything. Why not?”

“ Everything is a pretty tall order.”

Theo could feel his expression growing icy. Then Melissa stepped in.

“We’re not unsympathetic, Theo,” she said, with that voice like music, like wind chimes, and he felt himself warming again, even knowing that, while she claimed she and Arcott sympathized, she was really the only one who did.

“It would be wonderful to be able to share everything,” Melissa added. “But things are still precarious here. If you signed on to a hunting party sometime, you’d see how hard it is to keep all this going.”

Melissa herself had put in some scavenging duty, Theo recalled. The Atherton “hunting parties” hunted gemstones, not animals. In the early days they had raided the town itself, ransacking abandoned homes for jewelry-a macabre exercise, Theo thought, like plucking gold from a corpse’s teeth. Over the course of more recent months, the search had been expanded to nearby towns. And word was out on the trading routes that some wandering “gypsies” would pay handsomely in dry goods and matches for otherwise useless decorative stones. This was both good and bad: it increased the supply but also drove up the price.

And no amount of gemstones was enough to feed the voracious appetite of Jeff Arcott, whose experiments sucked up every stone not allotted to transportation or basic support.

But then, Jeff’s supply was far beyond what the hunting parties supplied; he had another source, one he chose not to discuss. Theo had seen him, however, on his late-night forays to the outskirts of town; had watched from hiding as the furtive shadows delivered the vast supplies needed to construct the new device of enigmatic design and purpose.

Theo knew these lurkers were not the benign, timid ones he sometimes drove supplies to out beyond the periphery of town, the grunters that had been eagerly awaiting him when that dragon had swooped down out of the setting sun and nearly filleted him; would have, too, if Cal Griffin hadn’t scooped up that fallen rifle and put paid to it.

No, these were creatures of a supremely nastier stripe. And while Theo sympathized, no, make that empathized-hell, tell the truth, identified -with the malformed, sad-sack bastards shivering out in what had once been soy and corn fields beyond town, he didn’t want to even consider any similarities between himself and those muttering dark little monsters that did the grunt work (literally) for Arcott under cover of night.

Even though the sight of them moving rapidly on stealthy feet set off some unspoken call within him that screeched like a smoke alarm.

“If it was widely known what we do,” Arcott was continuing, snaring Theo’s attention once more, “we wouldn’t be able to do it. We’d be fighting over resources.”

It was a good excuse, Theo thought, for maintaining a monopoly. It was probably even true.

“Whereas,” Arcott went on, “given a little time, a little understanding, we can maybe learn to synthesize the effect in a way that’s both affordable and exportable.”

Oh, noble dream. This would have been less convincing had it come from anyone other that Jeff. Arcott had been blessed with credibility. He was tall, raven-haired, with dazzling blue eyes, damn near angelic, if a dark angel. He looked utterly guileless in his jeans and ratty bomber jacket.

Theo pushed aside his glass of wine. It was making him surly.

And after that, if he kept drinking, it would make him loquacious, which was the last thing he wanted to be right now. Because Theo Siegel had a secret, one newly minted.

On his way here through the crisp night air, walking behind the dark bulk of Married Student Housing, he had heard the murmuring of a voice that should not be there, should very much be under lock and key elsewhere.

Not that Theo should have been able to hear that voice through so many layers of lath and plaster, and at such a distance. But there were times, fleeting moments, when his hearing was preternaturally sharp, his eyesight and sense of smell uncannily keen. And other times when he felt unusual aches and pains in his muscles and ligaments and bones, brief discomfitures that thankfully passed and left only dread.