Gray and battered, the landscape looked as if it had survived centuries of rain, a chiaroscuro sketch washed in tears. Alien gods wept over the ruins that lay like giant, broken teeth in the distance. The air stank of humus and rotting wood; the only trees that hadn’t shriveled into hollow, warped shells were the willows. They dotted the environment meagerly, a semi-circle of weary spinsters, bowed with the weight of their sodden limbs. Water ran in gray rivulets along the bark, trickled into the whorls of fallen leaves, decomposing in sickly hues of olive and ochre.
It was nearly twilight when he set down, perhaps forty meters from a farmhouse. It too was gray, the boards bent and decaying from exposure to the rain.
“No one’s here,” he murmured as he stepped down. The marshy soil sucked around his boot.
When he’d taken the tram to the city, this patch of land was lush and green. The vividness of the memory should have made him ache; Rocket Larkspur, Blanketflower, Scarlet Sage, and Yellow Cosmos had grown wild near the back porch. His mother had cut them back once a year, filling every room in the house with the wonderful scent. Usually, she ran out of vases; he remembered one autumn when she’d filled a copper bucket—how his father had teased her. And his sister—she had been ten when he took the tram. He had promised to bring her back a star. Fingering the chunk of asteroid rock in his pocket, he detested what he had become.
Something alerted him, the slurp of mud against bare feet. When he turned, he saw a thin creature—bent and gray—so like the landscape that he frowned. There was a certain familiarity about her haggardness; he felt he should know her. After the first moment, he knew it was a woman, though most of her femininity had been sacrificed on the altar of an affliction for which he had no name.
“Why have you come back?”
At last, he knew her. The vibrato in her voice was familiar—the witch girl. He struggled against the preternaturally vivid memory that began to impose itself over the reality of her. When he replied, his voice was neutral. “I wanted to see my family.”
“You were warned.” She tilted her head, birdlike, a question in her tone.
“Yes.” He’d known what to expect—the threat had been apparent even at such distance. It had taken him longer than he would have liked.
She smiled—even her teeth were gray. “Do I revolt you? Are you remembering that we played together as children? My fire images were not dangerous, then.”
Perception betrayed him; he lost sight of her truth. Blind and bitter with self-loathing, he asked, “What happened?”
With a flick of her wrist, she gestured to his craft, its silver streamlined sides the most vibrant presence in the vista. “Let me mask it. That should give us a few moments to talk.”
She signaled for him to turn around; he was not sworn to her secrets. When she indicated he might look, he saw it was not quite invisible, no, she hadn’t mastered the art to that degree, but it blended so well that it was impossible to detect at first glance.
“Come.”
Having no choice, he followed. Somehow this was not his world any longer. He would obey her rules.
One willow, bent nearly double against the onslaught of driving rain, had a larger trunk than the others. She pressed a section of bark—he never would have been able to find it—and a small door slid open. She beckoned for him to follow.
A home had been forged in the hollow of the tree. Within, it smelled of charred wood and ambergris. Atop a large metal desk, a stick of incense glowed with ginger light, crumbling to ash in its censer. The walls of the tree were smooth, sanded to the point of shine; soft cloth and mosses cushioned the floor. There was a rollaway cot, small though serviceable, and it was laid with layered blankets. Past the junkyard furniture was a space clearly used for magic; she had etched the lines in blood and fire, a few burnt relics scattered here and there.
“You aren’t terrified?” She answered her own question. “But you wouldn’t be frightened, would you? Before you left, I called you friend. And more.”
Mute with shame, he nodded—his crime defied explanation. The damnable thing that was his memory showed him how he had abandoned her. In stealth, he had packed his things, shoving whatever he could grab into a tan rucksack. Because he had read that the Corp was accepting volunteers—two days only, in the city that lay beyond the walls of the willow, a dead and broken thing. Apart from her, the Corp was all he had ever wanted, and without a moment’s hesitation, he had chosen his greater love.
“How little you’ve changed.” She walked around him as an inspector, touching him with a gnarled hand. “Still dark, wavy. I see you have not cut it. This honors the memory of your people.”
Tension balled in his stomach at her words but still he would not interrupt.
“Soon you will see your people, Michel. You should have not come back.” She paced a little, as far as the tree permitted. “The story—it is what you have come to hear. You would never have come for me. But first, tell me, do I revolt you? Answer honestly…I will know if you do not.”
Her bitterness had a taste, flavored with wormwood and gall. Her pain was his affliction; his soul, if he still possessed such a thing, groaned beneath the weight of it.
“No…I cannot abhor what I do not understand. I have not been gone long enough for you to age so. I recall your beauty…I was not blind to it.”
An awful smile curved her cracked lips. ‘You might find this impossible to believe, but of them all, I am the luckiest. I at least had the power in which to choose the manner of my change. I at least retained my humanity.”
“My family?” His voice eddied with the effort of preventing his memories from looping like an antiquated film reel.
She closed her eyes. “The government thought to improve our quality of life by exposing us to artificial solar energy. Neither our bodies, nor the planet were strong enough to withstand it. It triggered…change. I cannot tell you what happened, but all the species seem to have regressed…only the most primal instincts survive.”
“And you?” The question masked his reaction.
“I chose. At the time of exposure, I sensed the change. I linked with the land. The way it warped, grayed, became drab and ugly, so I did. But I live. And I retain the humanity the others did not. It was a fair price.”
“Petra.” His voice was husky, but she could not tell for whom his passion rang. “There is much pain in you. Much you do not tell me. You do not mention that you were unable to disconnect from the land—that you feel its suffering still.”
She turned, giving him her gnarled back, ridges of spine poking clearly through the thin material of the dress. “I had forgotten,” she said thickly. “When we were as children, you never responded to me harshly. Did you pity me even then?’
“I, pity you?” His astonishment was clear. “I might have pitied the sky more or the wind. I remember the way you ran, your hair streaming behind you in a scarlet banner. How would I pity this?”
“I had forgotten,” she said again. “I taunted you, because you would never know what I knew—never make the fire dance with a gesture, never hear the voice in the flame. And still, you agreed to the Joining.”
It did not fade.
He said it aloud. “It did not fade. I came to assess the damage here for the Corp, Petra, but more truly, I came for you. Did you think I would not feel your pain, even across such distance? When one Joins, particularly with a witch-girl, it is for life. When I think again what you bore—a human is not made to endure such pain as a world suffers.”
“It was a fair price,” she muttered. The harshness of her voice had faded until Michel heard an echo of the velvet of her youth.
“Was it?” he asked, an edge to his tone. “You say this because you do not see the consequences. You did not have the right.”
“Not see the consequences?” Her voice rose, passion breaking despair. “I bartered my beauty for life. It was mine; I had the right.”
“You almost destroyed me. I had no forewarning, no magic to ward the pain. Do not flatter yourself, witch-woman. Alone, you would have died. It was not your will that allowed you to withstand the pain of a planet—I took half that anguish, Petra. You forgot our Joining…I had no choice.”
“How can this be? You bear no marks; you suffer nothing.”
“I suffer nothing?” His voice broke like thunder. “The pain took your body, Petra. It took my mind.”
She froze. “Speak plainly…please.”
Only once before, she had spoken that word to him, her lips a breath away from his own. He knelt at her feet. “The base of my skull…lift up my hair.” He felt her fingers tremble as they discovered truth.
“What are you?” she breathed, recoiling in a motion that was not so much disgust as trepidation.
“Replicant. I was dead, Petra—brain fried. Bastion-1 brought me back as a construct, based on backup files in the ship’s logs.”
“Who is this Bastion-1?”
“An emergency program on my ship, set to respond under such conditions. I was exploring rimspace in black silence when it happened.” He grimaced. “Yet I suffer nothing. My shell has been constructed to match my condition when catastrophe struck. But I am neither man, nor machine. Incapable of love.”
“And you are not the same?” Petra asked, desperately trying to cope with what he was—what she’d done.
“Intellectually, I function better than ever. But I feel nothing. Only memories can evoke emotion, and now I find everything I once knew destroyed. Except you. I will not live in an emotional wasteland, Petra. You forgot our Joining once. Remember it now.”
She quivered as she realized he had leashed his pain to explore hers; their bond made them sensitive to the point of sixth perception. As his quiet, crashing confusion swamped her, she recognized that his alienation surpassed her own.
“It was a fair price,” she said again, desperately. “We live, still.”
He gave a bark of what might have been laughter. “Still we live…I have come for you, Petra. I have already learned what the Corp needed to know—this barren planet does not interest me any longer. I come for you.”
“Do you mean to murder me for my mistake?” Her words were defiant; her eyes, without hope. They had once been the blue of tropical waters; their current hue glinted like ice in winter trees. “Your fate was tied to mine, and you’ve suffered as I did. Do you prefer this?” She cracked the door, mist seeping inside.
Three caricatures of humanity slavered over a carcass that resembled a deer, though its coat was shaggy and piebald. The animal’s graceful neck was bent at an unnatural angle, its liquid eyes frozen with terror that Michel should have found moving. Six feral eyes darted from the feast, broad nostrils flaring at an unfamiliar scent. One creature ripped away chunks of flesh with its teeth and then bowed its head to lap the pooling blood. Naked, the beasts were covered in filth and running sores. Once human skin hung in folds, drooping over sharp bones as if it were fine raiment that no longer fit.
She shut the door tightly. “This is your family. What option did I have?”
He nodded, all weariness. The loss was incalculable; his intellectual cognizance of pain was a white-hot mass of tangling silicate. “You could have done little else.”
“Then why did you come, if not for revenge?”
“We belong,” he said simply. “We participated in the Joining too young—the stars sang to me and I ran from you—and you forgot our vows. But we are Bound. I have lost much, as have you. The creature I am, I feel nothing, save for you.”
“Me?” Her voice disbelieved. She looked at herself. “I am all that is hideous. Even if I wanted to go with you, I would not believe.”
“You are mine,” he repeated. “I left you because I was afraid. I claim you now.”
She backed away, unconsciously making gestures of warding. “Please…do not.”
The warmth of his hands rested on her shoulders; he absently stroked the protrusions of bone. His hands moved to each button down her dress.
“Please…do not…” she repeated, begging. “If you know mercy, do not.”
“You owe me this,” he muttered. “And I can take only you.”
“I am…so ugly.” Her voice broke; she knelt at his feet, wretchedly trying to cover her thin, warped body.
“In my mind’s eye, I see your beauty. Trust.” His whisper threaded through her.
She stood slowly, only a shiver revealing her shame. “Then I trust. According to the ancient laws of Joining, you have the right to me. It is as it must be.”
The warmth of his hands felt sweet on her withered flesh as he lifted her. He laid her on the cot, draping her with a blanket, and she could not deny the anguish that insisted she was too wretched for his eyes. He disrobed—his Corp uniform seemed surreal draped neatly over the salvaged steel desk. She’d thought she would never see him again; it had been years since she had spoke with another human, only the voices in the fire.
The beauty of his hot, solid flesh hurt her, and she looked away. He slid in beside her, not shy about the way his body contacted hers. She shivered.
“Michel,” she said then, and stopped because his arms had gone around her. He stroked the bones of her back, her wrinkled skin.
He shushed her, his mouth playing with hers gently. His hand tangled in her hair, and its softness in his palm did not mention its changed color. He found her meager breasts with his mouth; they had young brown nipples that perked to his tongue. In the half-light, pleasure drove her in and out of humiliation.
He murmured old words to her, meanings obscured except for their passion and radiance. With lips and fingers, he stroked her as though she retained the beauty he remembered more clearly than she, until she forgot her ugliness. She arched her knotted spine and offered herself up. Parting her thighs, he claimed her before she lost the illusion and most of the pleasure.
She was young again and running with him along green hills; the air was heavy with jasmine and joy. She called to him and he answered. Together, they fell, clinging, into soft grasses. He lifted her skirt and thrust into her while she chanted words of Joining. Then their souls soared from physical mooring, a headlong flight through a fey wood. Loving and aflame, they spiraled like ivy on the trees. Spires of green surrounded them—dank, sweet and beautiful—until unexpectedly, they caught a glimpse of sky.
“For you too?” she whispered, shuddering at the clarity of the memory.
“Always.” He intoned the archaic words that bound her.
“Always,” she echoed.
“Come with me. Together we will find what we have lost.” His dark eyes were enigmatic.
She rose and slipped into her dress. She made the gesture of warding as they walked toward his ship.
