Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

I babble on. I don’t know for how long. It feels so good, to confess all this to Yves. I tell him about the goat’s milk, and the laundry basket. I tell him about the hamburger and the bicycle chains. I tell him about the moonlight runs through the forest. I tell him about the time with the axe, and the way Flayer can call to me from half a mile away.

Yves listens to everything, and then he says, “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

I nod, staring down at my pet. “Yeah. Broke the law. Endangered our entire neighborhood. Lied to everyone.”

He shakes his head. “Wen, you trained a killer unicorn. No one can do that. No one can catch one, no one can kill one, no one can tame one! But you did!”

“I—”

“Even the one at the carnival was covered in chains. They’re wild, vicious, but this one…” Yves gestures to Flayer, who wags his tail like Yves is about to throw him a ham hock. “He listens to you! He stays where you want him to. It’s a miracle.”

I stare down at the unicorn. A miracle .

I’ve been praying to God to deliver me from my unwelcome powers, the curse of my dangerous and unholy magic. I’ve been praying for Him to direct my hand, to give me strength to destroy the demon unicorn Heplaced in my path. And all this time, I thought He’d refused because of my own sins—my defiance of the law, my disobedience toward my parents. I thought I’d failed Him.

But what if… God wanted me to care for this unicorn? What if He sent it to me to discover a way to prevent what happened to my cousins from ever occurring again?

What if my powers aren’t a curse at all? What if they’re… a gift?

“We have to tell the world,” Yves finishes.

I snuggle the unicorn close to my chest. “No way. If I come out of the woods with Flayer by my side, he’ll be taken from me, experimented on, destroyed. What chance does this little guy have against helicopters and searchlights? Against napalm?”

Yves says, “There has to be something. Maybe your parents—”

“My parents think unicorns are demons and my powers are witchcraft.”

It’ll never work. Too many lives have been destroyed by unicorns. Even Yves looks uncertain as I continue to cuddle the killer unicorn in my lap.

If only they could feel what it’s like to run through the woods by Flayer’s side. If only they knew how much Flayer loves me, and I him. I never feel so free, so right as I do when I’m alone in the forest with the unicorn. If only God would reveal His plan to them as well.

“Okay,” says Yves. “What about those people in Italy? The unicorn hunters? They understand your powers, right?”

Yeah, but even they wanted to use my powers to help them kill unicorns. Maybe I could show them how to use our gifts for this instead, but first I’d have to persuade them to spare my unicorn. I scratch the base of Flayer’s horn, where the tiny flower marking is barely visible. Protecting Flayer is what matters most. The world can wait.

“Stay,” I say to the unicorn as I join Yves again. “What if I left?”

“You mean, like, run away?” Yves looks stricken. “Wen, you can’t—”

“Flayer and me, we’re safe in the forest. And I can keep an eye on him, make sure he eats only wild animals. And me… I used to be a really good camper.”

“But what about school? What about food? What about the other unicorns?” Yves shakes his head. “No, there’s got to be another way.”

“A way where I can save Flayer?” I ask. “What way is that? Everyone in the world wants him dead but me!”

“We could—” Yves casts about desperately for an alternative. “We could ask Summer. She’s involved in the Sierra Club, she knows people at the World Wildlife Fund…”

Right. Her.

“Yves.” I bite my lip, but it’s too late and the words pour out. “I know you and Summer—”

He kisses me then. Full on, noses smashing. Our arms go around each other, and Flayer bleats in surprise, but I don’t care. Last fall may have been a mistake, but this isn’t. I just wish I had figured it out before. Before Summer. Before Flayer. Before I feared I’d never see him again.

We’re still kissing when Mom and Dad come up over the hill. I feel Flayer’s alarm, hear him start to growl, and I pull away from Yves. My parents’ faces are dark with fury, dim with shock. Their daughter, their little Wen. Lying. Woods. Magic. Kissing.

I move to stand beside my killer unicorn.

Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and has since lived in South Africa, the UK, Vanuatu, and Laos. Heistheauthorof novel The Bookman, linked story collection HebrewPunk , novellas “Cloud Permutations” and “An Occupation of Angels,” and the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (with Nir Yaniv). He also edited anthology The Apex Book of World SF , and runs the World SF Blog. Forthcoming works include novels Osama and Martian Sands , and second in the Bookman Chronicles, Camera Obscura , all due later this year.

Her name wasn’t Molly and she didn’t wear shades, reflective or otherwise.

She was watching the length of the platform.

Hua Lamphong at dusk: a warm wind blowing through the open platforms where the giant beasts puffed smoke and steam into the humid air, the roof of the train station arching high overhead.

Her name wasn’t Noi, either, in case you asked, though it’s a common enough name. It wasn’t Porn, or Ping. It wasn’t even Friday.

She was watching the platform, scanning passengers climbing aboard, porters shifting wares, uniformed police patrolling at leisure. She was there to watch out for the Old Man.

She wasn’t even a girl. Not exactly. And as for why the Old Man was called the Old Man…

He was otherwise known as Boss Gui: head and bigfala bos of the Kunming Toads. She got the job when she’d killed Gui’s Toad bodyguards—by default, as it were.

But that had happened back in Kunming. This was Bangkok, Bangkok at dusk—this was Hua Lamphong, greatest of train stations, where the great slugs breathed steam and were rubbed and scrubbed by the slug-boys whose job it was to nurture them before departure. And the Old Man wasn’t exactly an old man, either.

Scanning, waiting for the Old Man to arrive: Yankee tourists with in-built cams flashing as they posed beside the great beasts, these neo-nagas of reconstituted DNA, primitive nervous system, and prodigious appetite. Scanning: a group of Martian-Chinese from TongYun City walking cautiously—unused to the heavier gravity of this home/planet. Scanning: three Malay businessmen—Earth-Belt Corp. standardized reinforced skeletons—they moved gracefully, like dancers— wired through and through, hooked up twenty-four Earth-hours an Earth-day, seven Earth-days a week to the money-form engines, the great pulsating web of commerce and data, that singing, Sol-system-wide, von Neumann-machine expanded network of networks of networks….

Wired with hidden weaponry, too: she made a note of that.

An assassin can take many shapes. It could be the sweet old lady carrying two perfectly balanced baskets of woven bamboo over her shoulders, each basket filled with sweet addictive fried Vietnamese bananas. It could be the dapper K-pop starlet with her entourage, ostensibly here to rough it a bit for the hovering cameras. It could be the couple of French backpackers—he with long, thinning silver hair and a cigarette between his lips, she with a new face courtesy of Soi Cowboy’s front-and-back street cosmetic surgeries—baby-doll face, but the hands never lie and the hands showed her true age, in the lines etched there, the drying of the skin, the quick-bitten nails polished a cheap red—