Hearsay Horizons

Marie locked the back door and then hurried to lock the front. She unplugged the phone. She lowered the blinds and pulled the curtain on the window in the front room. Her cell was already on vibrate, but she turned it off.             She wasn’t surprised when she heard the rap on her window. She had her head under her pillow, but she still heard the tap and the muffled voice.            “Marie, open the door. I live here too!"            “Then use your key," Marie said.            “I gave it to--mom. Stop being a puss and just get your ass up.”             Marie rose and eased her way through the small house to the back door. A young woman stood there glowering, marked as kin to Marie by her nubbish nose and fr...

A woman stands in the window. At least, she’s probably a woman--she’s standing still as a droid, but that’s the style nowadays even if you’re made of flesh. She is lit not from behind, but by the faint glow of a streetlamp or the momentary passing of a car. The shifting light throws up shadows on the curtain behind her. It scintillates off the opalescent scales glued to her skin--probably glued, but they might be as real. As real as anything else about droids and replicants. She might be a homebrew from Progitech.             One car stops. It sinks to the ground like an animal at rest. The passenger rises easily from the back. He moves as though to straighten his lapels, but he is wearing one of the vinyl jumpsuits common in the junk neighborhoods, and he has no lapels. The man gestures to the woman, and no movement spoils whether she’s a living person or a skillfully-made droid. She can't be alive, but a droid’d be a lucky find in a bad area like this....

Repair crews in Acadia worked fast; a week after Sarah assessed the damage caused by her own fight with Chymera, it was as though she'd never brawled the bestial shifter at all. She walked down smooth asphalt, up a sidewalk pale with newness, and briefly touched a spot of bricks on the café wall that were just a little out of place. Her own unblemished reflection stared back at her in the big window. When Jane popped into being behind her with a coffee, Sarah grimaced at the scabbed bite marks peeking out of the other woman's collar.            "Here," Jane said. Sarah turned to accept the coffee the teleporter held out to her. "I--already ate the muffins. Sorry." They both looked back into the café. "Sure you don't want to go inside? Get more muffins?" Jane asked. "She didn't let him out." Sarah turned away as a woman began stepping out from behind the counter inside.          ...

The sleeping dragon's breath gleamed on the twisted and slagged treasures piled around it. It was a banked forge ready to flare at the faintest touch. It felt the small hand that closed on one of its trinkets like the creature was touching its flesh. Light footsteps echoed on the stone as the dragon roused itself.           It shook its limbs to loosen its joints; calcified scales rained down around its claws as it dug them into the stone. The dragon dragged its swollen self over its hoard and discarded bones toward the faint smell of fresh air blowing in from the entrance. Its tarnished scales scraped on stone that was already worn almost smooth.          It breathed in gasps by the time it cleared the entrance to the lair. The dragon stuck there; it forced its bulk outward. It saw the adventurers arrayed out there at the same time it felt, more than heard, the rumble behind it and the screech of stone on stone.     ...

"Someone kicked me. He sent me across the length of the table, and almost into sight. I heard nothing from them about my gasp when I landed. He said nothing about what he kicked; I must have weighed as much as air to him. I waited with my prize. I dreaded the idea that they would clear the table. But the guests left. There was silence. I climbed up onto the table.                       "During my scraps raids, I usually moved quickly and tossed food down to pile up and pull away. Now I dove into the first full glass I saw. It stung my eyes. Red coated my hair, filled my nose, choked my mouth. There was a glass of water, and that was better. I was so thirsty that I opened my mouth and almost tried to breathe it. Then I could focus on food. But I stumbled. I couldn't move well. I thought I was sick: too much food, too fast. After I almost fell off the tall, tall table, I worked my slow way down to the floor. One piece of meat was eno...

A brick struck Chymera in the small of the back. The creature snarled and turned toward Jane where the teleporter stared at her from near the broken brick wall. Chymera breathed in, and her chest rattled. Jane scooped up another half brick and took a bite of the hotdog in her hand before teleporting out of the way of Chymera's toxic spittle. It didn't dissolve the concrete, but it glistened sickly in the sunlight. The creature flexed; the same substance began dripping from its shifting teeth and claws.           Chymera caught the next brick Jane threw; she tossed it back slathered in venom, but Jane was already gone. She reappeared behind Chymera.            "Hey!" she said. Chymera turned. "Ice cream?" She vanished before Chymera's claws scythed through the air where she'd been standing. Jane popped into being next to Sarah's still figure. She dumped the cup of ice water now in her...

Heroes run toward chaos and screaming. Less expected was the screaming running toward us. Men and women stumbled up the street; buildings like cliffs to either side funneled these victims and their tormentor toward us. A tentacle whipped forward through the throng to grab one young woman. It hauled her backward, and we lost sight of her. Here at the café the road broadened to permit street parking. The crowd thinned, permitting us a view as Chymera fell upon her meal.              She was nominally human, but her ceaseless partial transformations overwhelmed her features: ram's horns sprouted and then fell away; tails grew, and then retracted; a wave of fur displaced a sheen of scales that grew hard like armor plates; claws swelled on hands that became paw-like too late to prevent her fingers from splitting open; fangs distorted her mouth as she ate. Her hyena teeth chewed through the woman's upper arm, tearing through the meat as Chyme...

She was dying. I searched for her in the evanescent blackness. Here was an arm, here the curve of her shoulder. I pulled. The creature resisted, but it was the passive resistance of a tar pit; I pried her free of the bulk. It clung to her on lumps and strings. In some places, the substance seemed to have fused with her flesh already. It seethed against my fingers and tried to climb them. I murmured to her. Pled with her. Begged her. I didn’t know whether she could even hear me, with her mouth still agape with a scream that drowned me out.             Her hand sought mine, and she struggled against whatever force held her to nod her head. Agreement. Her craven father’s deal held no weight against this new bargain with her; the strength of the summerlands roared into this cursed vacuum. My touch burnt away the eldritch creature. I approached, and it folded in on itself. I didn’t think it cowered, could not know I was there, but this ...

"Miss Beaufort! Miss The Ibis, may I have a moment?" "Miss Beaufort! Will there be a crackdown on time manipulation?"                             "Miss Beaufort! Did the talks go well?" Grace looked over her long nose at this journalist as she walked down the shallow steps of the Senate house. She glanced over her shoulder with an exaggerated twist. The news fiends followed her gaze up to the pitted stone and aged wood.                             "Mrs. Popov!" This brought Grace whipping around back to the throng. She stopped so suddenly that the man she escorted stumbled and hung from her grip on his arm until she was able to haul him to his feet beside her. The orange light at his throat blinked furiously with his pulse. Grace ignored his whimpers as he tried to reverse time and couldn't.               ...

Charis Ioannou was a fishwife making a living in Ithaca. One fateful day her vessel underwent a vicious attack by a creature whose appearance hurt the mind. She had nearly made it to shore when a tentacle snagged her ankle. In the last few moments before she was delivered unto the thing's maw, it was sundered to pieces and a beautiful voice that reminded her of a calm sea offered her strength to last through the ages. This strength, though, came in more limbs than she cared to count, skin with an alien texture, and hair akin to seaweed. She watched her family, but she never dared approach. She returned one day after carrying out a charge to find the small home on the coast completely wiped out; nothing but bodies remained. Her ‘god’ had done this, it said, so that she could focus on the tasks at hand. Standing on the shore, she clenched the strange limbs and screamed for the strength to burn away her ‘benefactor.’ And again, strength was offered to her. Again, she took it gladly. B...

Sarah Keaton, better known to the city as the Grasshopper, watched her lunch partner in awe. Jane ate in defiance of her wraithlike build and emaciated face; pizza slathered in ranch, fries, burgers, and wings all disappeared into her gullet. This was a breakfast café, so this was all particularly impressive. The wait staff said nothing about the pile of crumpled fast food bags under Jane's chair, nor anything about the dog laying beside it.        "So you see my problem," Jane said, somehow. Her pace never slowed. "No other empowered eats like me. Not even the big ones." Sarah considered her. She shifted her own croissants and muffins onto Jane's side of the table; they disappeared like all the rest.        "Well, you don't have a tapeworm," Sarah said, "Or I'd hear it talking to me." A neighboring customer's cup clicked hard on his plate, but Jane kept chewing. "And you're not pregnant?" Jane shook her head. ...

Sarah and Buster were in the park with PG when it happened. The ground trembled, the dog growled, and Sarah's stomach flopped over. Her phone rang, or began to ring, but it cut off suddenly. Dust flew up on the horizon, and Sarah--Sarah knew what this was. She moved to grab her phone--and PG dropped the dog-chewed top hat they'd been throwing. She grabbed Sarah's hand. Their fingers intertwined tightly. Sarah frowned at the horizon. Blue skies dangling over the uneven skyline.           And Buster, barking and whining and staring at Sarah as she frowned down at him. He darted away when she reached down with her free hand. Away, and then back toward their bags. Away, and then back toward their bags. Away--and then he was pulling his vest from its pocket on her bag.             She tugged her hand free from the white-faced PG. Sound and sensation flooded back, and only then did Sarah realize how muffled PG made everything. Now siren...