“Jesus, Karen,” he says.

  Just like that, in that moment, he’s back. He covers his mouth with his fist, holding in laughter. “Did you hear the Service guy?”

  “You mean ‘You ought to be fucking fined’?”

  He bends over, wheezing and crowing. “Christ! I really thought the slick was going in the water.”

  “But it didn’t go in the water?”

  “No.”

  He sits up, wipes his eyes on the back of his hand, then reaches out to smooth my hair away from my face.

  “No. It didn’t go in. It was fine. Not that it matters, with that giant dump floating in the Pacific.”

  He reads my face, and raises his hands, palms out. “Okay, okay. No Mr. Simko.”

  He backs out, shuts the door gently, and gets in the driver’s seat. The white clown on the boardwalk watches our car pull out of the lot. We’re almost at the hotel when Honey wakes up.

  “Mama?” she mumbles. “I’m hungry.”

  “Okay, sweetie.”

  I untie the top piece of my suit and pull it down. “Dave? I’m going to feed her in the car.”

  “Okay. I’ll park in the shade. I’ll bring you something to eat from inside.”

  “Thanks.”

  Honey’s wriggling on my lap, fighting the sheets. “Mama, I’m hungry.”

  “Hush. Hush. Here.”

  She nuzzles at me, quick and greedy, and latches on. Not at the nipple, but in the soft area under the arm. She grips me lightly with her teeth, and then there’s the almost electric jolt as her longer, hollow teeth come down and sink in.

  “There,” I whisper. “There.”

  Dave gets out and shuts the door. We’re alone in the car.

  A breeze stirs the leaves outside. Their reflections move in the windows.

  I don’t know what the future is going to bring. I don’t think about it much. It does seem like there won’t be a particularly lengthy future, for us. Not with so few human children being born, and the Fair Folk eating all the animals, and so many plant species dying out from the slick. And once we’re gone, what will the Fair Folk do? They don’t seem able to raise their own children. It’s why they came here in the first place. I don’t know if they feel sorry for us, but I know they want us to live as long as possible: they’re not pure predators, as some people claim. The abductions of the early days, the bodies discovered in caves—that’s all over. The terror, too. That was just to show us what they could do. Now they only kill us as punishment, or after they’ve voided, when they’re crazy with hunger. They rarely hurt anyone in the company of a winged child.

  Still, even with all their precautions, we won’t last forever. I remember the artist in the park, when I took Honey there one day. All of his paintings were white. He said that was the future, a white planet, nothing but slick, and Honey said it looked like fairyland.

  Her breathing has slowed. Mine, too. It’s partly the meds, and partly some chemical that comes down through the teeth. It makes you drowsy.

  Here’s what I know about the future. Honey Bear will grow bigger. Her wings will expand. One day she’ll take to the sky, and go live with her own kind. Maybe she’ll forget human language, the way the Simko’s Mandy has, but she’ll still bring us presents. She’ll still be our piece of the future.

  And maybe she won’t forget. She might remember. She might remember this day at the beach.

  She’s still awake. Her eyes glisten, heavy with bliss. Large, slightly protuberant eyes, perfectly black in the centers, and scarlet, like the sunrise, at the edges.

  The Forgotten Ones

  Karin Lowachee

  In the twilight, my brother Hava’s eyes glow red. Before the old women of Rumi village were washed from this life, they said it was the spirit of blood in him, my twin. I do not have such spirit. I am the silent breath, the old women said, she who walks behind the blood and is last in the sand before death. Death is the final hand that smooths your tracks beneath the waves. And before death there is the silent breath, and before the silent breath there is the blood. And my brother’s eyes glow red with it.

  In the twilight, hidden by broad leaves that bend over the shore and give shadow, we wait. We lie on our stomachs, Hava and I and all of our twenty soldiers, chins to the dark earth, smelling the spring richness of new growth. The wind plays a song above us in the trees. The scampering feet of the little animals up and down the trunks and across the floor of the forest are a low drumbeat, a thudding of tiny hearts. I could go to sleep here, like I used to do with Hava on the fallen trunks of lightning-struck trees. Before the Lopo came and killed our parents. Lopo from across the waters.

  When I first saw them with their guns and their tall hats, I was afraid. But now I have seen them without their hats. I have taken their guns and felt the power of their shouts like a storm come in from the sea. The power in my hands, from their guns. And though the Lopo sit in our villages and sharpen their knives on our stone and rest their boots on our tables, I have seen them at my feet, in blood, and it flows as dark and thick as what runs out of me in that week of womanhood.

  The Lopo keep coming from across the waters, and though we are half their size, barely thirteen strides along the sands of life, we drive them back. We, Hava and I and our twenty soldiers, have forced the Lopo to huddle in our villages, to sharpen their knives on our stone and beat their boots on our tables in frustration. Eventually, Hava says, their blood will flow to the waters and become one, until nothing will be left but the waters. And us, the children of the dead ones. We who have been here for as long as the old women remembered. We who were here first.

  “Sister,” Hava whispers to me. “Go tell Umeneni to climb the father tree. I think I see them on the waters.”

  I slither backward, deeper into the forest, until the glow of moonlight on the water disappears. The earth is damp beneath my knees as I scamper to the left, where Umeneni waits on his belly, chin to the ground. Broad chair-leaves arc over his back and narrow shoulders. The black mud in his deep red hair smells like starberries. We crush the sour buds into the earth until their juices create the paste. For a moment I think of our morning together and the feel of his coarse hair through my fingers when I twisted them with mud. He sat on a rock and cleaned his killing knife and the sun was strong on his brown shoulders and the back of my neck. His eyes are not spirit red, but blue like the waters. My father would have liked Umeneni. We would have had a child by now, if not for the Lopo.

  Tonight he might die and I hate the Lopo. When I look at Umeneni and think of the children we do not have, I can kill the Lopo as viciously as Hava. I can slice their skin from their sinew and throw them to the sharks. My bones are tired with the feeling of it.

  “Ara,” Umeneni whispers, his breath against my cheek.

  “Hava says to climb the father tree. The Lopo might be on the waters now. You must count how many, and where.”

  I see his mud-locks bob up and down in shadow, and then he is gone, leaving nothing behind but the twitch of a sheltering leaf and the scent of starberries.

  We do not know why the Lopo came. We do not know why we were forced to flee our homes as children and hide among the trees, prey for the big cats and the Lopo alike. One morning when Hava and I were only ten strides across the sands of life the Lopo landed on our shores with their long boats and their guns and their tall hats. Their shiny booted feet left deep imprints in the ground that filled up with rain but never washed away. The old women in our village, the ones who were there to remember and to carve, cursed at the Lopo and called them by names I had never heard. And the Lopo said, “That was long before our time and the agreement means nothing.” Somehow they knew our language. And I understood them perfectly, though their words made no sense.

  But it did not matter. Their weapons were their words.

  I wait beside Hava. The waves roll into shore like a mother’s gentle breath, rippling the skin of the earth. Moonlight flitters on the waters as if it is calling for the fish to surface. Yet it calls the Lopo and when the Lopo come they bring only ruin. They row in as silent as the forest when a hunter is on the prowl. And all the world knows that death sits among it.

  “Something is wrong,” Hava says. I see the moon line of his profile in the near-dark. The corners of his eyes are red as though he bleeds tears. But it is only the glow of his blood spirit.

  A hand touches my heel and I look back over my shoulder. Umeneni crawls up between us and lays down on his belly. His shoulder touches mine and it is warm from his climb on the father tree. Mine is cool from the night.

  “There are lights,” he whispers. “Far out along the horizon. But they come closer and they are fast.”

  “How many?” Hava asks. “How fast?”

  Umeneni’s voice is a shudder. “Too many and too fast.”

  Umeneni has the best sight among us. He has always spied far and wide. Once he saw a line of five Lopo hunters winding furtive and silent through the path of the big cats, covered in leaves and soil. Yet Umeneni saw them.

  My brother says, “Maybe they come in different boats. Maybe they have new boats.”

  “Maybe,” Umeneni says.

  Hava knows the Lopo. He’s tasted their golden blood.

  “We will wait,” Hava says. “And hide.”

  Umeneni says nothing, but I feel his gaze in the dark just as close as his skin. The disturbance in my brother’s voice wafts through me like a shiver.

  Before our attacks on the Lopo, Hava would always draw our positions in the sand, in the earth. We and our soldiers, fifty strong as they once were, and even now when they are twenty, we all gathered around this map of our close futures and Hava would take his finger and trace patterns in the ground. His touch glided through the fine grains like the gods must sift our lives, separating some, pushing others together. We knew at some time the waters or the rain would wipe these marks away, but we never stayed long enough to see it. And so the lines of life that Hava traced in the earth would remain in our minds, marked deep and true. And we took them with us into battle. Lines like the grooves on the skin of our palms. Lines like the veins that run beneath our skin.

  Blood paths.

  And I would think, always, Is this the path of my children, if ever I should have them? Would their feet ever imprint on sand that does not wash away after two turnings of the moon?

  The lights scud toward us like falling stars, rolling through the surface of the waves. Impossibly fast. Faster than any Lopo boat. The closer they come, the clearer we see. Not just Umeneni and his far sight. We all see.

  The lights do not touch the waters. They fly above it.

  “Not the Lopo,” Umeneni whispers, in fear. Umeneni who has killed a hundred Lopo and yet with me his touch is gentle. He fears little. He doesn’t even fear my brother.

  I feel our soldiers shifting behind us. What do we do? Run? Scatter?

  “Stay,” Hava says, loud enough so it branches through the trees and quiets the others.

  The lights come silent. They pour day onto the shore, the trees, our hidden forms among the forest floor. White day. The lights bring wind and heat like a summer breeze, and the shake and growl of a thunderstorm, but only in passing. Only in nearness, like you hear someone breathe in sleep if you are the only one awake.

  The lights sweep over our heads like birds and disappear.

  And in a flash, my brother chases the beat of their windless wings through the feet of the bowing trees.

  I run, Umeneni by my side, our soldiers around us. We follow Hava and the storm of the lights as they skate the top of the forest. If these are Lopo, we must track them. We must get to them before they join the Lopo in our villages and become one.

  The ground stabs my feet. The forest is alive with the snap and crack of our fiery path, cut by my brother.

  These Lopo fly.

  The three words beat a rhythm in my breath. The loud drumming of a death dance.

  I want to grab Hava back and keep him still. I want to hold Umeneni to my breasts and say, Wait.

  The blood can wait.

  These Lopo fly.

  Yet if the Lopo had such ability to fly among the clouds like birds, surely we would have known it. Surely you cannot go from water to sky in just a few turnings of the moon. The Lopo are not gods. They bleed, though their blood is golden like honey. But their spirits are not red like my brother’s.

  “Hava!” I shout. I don’t care. The lights drown all but the closest noise.

  But he doesn’t stop. In his hand flashes the silver of his killing knife. He hunts the lights.

  “Rumi village,” Umeneni says, on a gasp. Running as I run.

  I recognize the path, even in moonlight and the dying blaze of the beasts overhead.

  We are going home.

  My brother stops on the edge of our village. What was once our village, where the old women sat outside their homes and braided long leaves into mats for our beds. Now the Lopo lie on our mats, still stained by the blood of our mothers.

  Hava crouches at the feet of the trees. Our soldiers gather around in a line of attack, the positions of habit. I barely gather breath enough to speak before Hava turns to me, the red now so vibrant in his eyes that I barely see the white.

  “They are friends of the Lopo,” Umeneni says, his voice harsh, his teeth bared.

  The lights touched ground in the clear spaces of the village. They are shaped almost like boats, almost like birds. Strange inbetween creatures that bellow the white of bright day over all the scattered homes. Yet the mud roofs don’t melt and the grass of the walls do not burn.

  “But the Lopo do not come out,” I say. “Where are their brothers, if it’s true they are friends?”

  “The Lopo hide,” Hava says, resting the tip of his killing knife in the earth. “See the shadows move inside that house? They do not come out. They are afraid.”

  There is no fear in Hava’s voice. He stares at the inbetween creatures.

  A door opens on the belly of one of the creatures. We wait, silent, but no Lopo emerge from the homes to greet the open door. Not a stirring.

  A tall figure walks from the creature’s belly, but it isn’t clad in tattered Lopo grey. It wears stitchless black. And it is the shape of us, with arms and legs. But big like our mothers and fathers had been.

  Hava sheaths his knife and reaches to his other hip. Soon he holds a Lopo gun and aims it through the trees. Tracking. Umeneni does the same, but I don’t move.

  Things that travel inside a flying creature. How will guns help? Better to sneak up on them. Better to jump on their backs and bring them down one by one, and then use the knife.

  More figures emerge from the creature’s belly. I lose the count at fifty. Soon the entire village is filled by these black-clad people. They are beetle-shaped on the head and about the eyes, as though they come from insect kin.

  A voice calls out. It sounds like language, but not ours. Lopo words. Calling to the Lopo who hide in our houses.

  But the Lopo do not come out. They are cowards.

  So the beetle people swarm into the houses. Noise erupts, shouting, gunfire, flashes of light and the shake of violence. Some of the beetle people wait outside, not speaking. Not helping. They stand like trees.

  Soon the rest of them reappear. The lights from their inbetween creatures reflect on their insect heads.

  They hold the Lopo by their long spindly arms. Lopo warriors, men and women, some of them bleeding. They are ugly clean, and uglier in blood. They make a sticky yellow visage and their too-long legs bend deeper than normal, driven to kneel by these beetle people. The beetle people set the Lopo in the middle of our village, like the Lopo had once done to us, and make them sit on the earth. They hold the Lopo guns and they do not say a word. Yet they all move in agreement as though they can read one another’s minds.

  Enemies of the Lopo, yet Hava does not twitch or give us a command. Are these beetle people here to return our villages to us? Or will they push us to the ground, smoothing it with our blood?

  My hands are cold with the thought. I touch Umeneni’s back to feel his warmth. We must hide. We must pretend we are not here and when these beetle people leave with the Lopo, we will have our villages back. And we will grow old under the sun like the women who weaved and carved and remembered.

  But my brother does not move.

  One of the beetle people walks away from the others. The insect head faces the trees, turns toward us. It raises an arm. I see now that it has five fingers on its hand. On both hands. It is very much in the shape of our people. Except for the insect head.

  But then it removes its insect head, like you would remove a hat. The black eyes go with it too and beneath it all is a face much like Umeneni’s. Like mine.

  A woman.

  “Come out,” it says, toward the trees. To us. Somehow it speaks our language even though the lilt and sigh of the words are unfamiliar, like when the Lopo speak. Yet we understand. It says, “Come out now, children.”

  I want to grip Umeneni’s hand, and my brother’s, but instead we hold our weapons. Hava stands and looks over his shoulder at me.

  “Stay,” he says. “All of you.”

  “No, Hava.” I try to catch his arm, but he walks out alone toward the beetle people. Toward the one who has a face like mine, and speaks our language, though she flew to us like a bird.

  Umeneni tries to touch my shoulder, but I run out after my brother.

  The beetle people swivel to face me. I stop, planting my feet, feeling the night air breathe cold up my bare legs. Hava turns.

  “Ara!” He gestures sharply. “Go back!”

  “No,” the beetle woman says. Closer and I see she is like my mother was, beneath the smooth clothing. She has a woman’s breasts and she is tall like one, broader than me about the hips. Her voice, free of the insect head, is the gentle trickle of river water. “Let her come too. Both of you.” Hava frowns at me. But he offers his hand. So I take my brother’s hand and we approach.