Shards and Ashes

  Contents

  Introduction by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong

  Hearken by Veronica Roth

  Branded by Kelley Armstrong

  Necklace of Raindrops by Margaret Stohl

  Dogsbody by Rachel Caine

  Pale Rider by Nancy Holder

  Corpse Eaters by Melissa Marr

  Burn 3 by Kami Garcia

  Love Is a Choice by Beth Revis

  Miasma by Carrie Ryan

  About the Authors

  Also Edited by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong

  In recent years, there have been a plethora of disasters and political upheavals. The news makes a person pause and ponder. Yet . . . we could’ve said the same thing in past years—and undoubtedly we will be able to say it in the future. Somehow, to us, the news has seemed more poignant of late. We see threats looming, ways things could go horribly awry, and wonder at the uncertainty of the world. Maybe it’s as simple as being mothers to teenagers who are leaving the nest. In discussing this one sunny afternoon, we thought it would be interesting to ask various writers/friends to envision a dangerous future. Oddly (or not), they thought this sounded like a grand idea.

  A couple of the contributors already write of dark futures in their novels. One of them, Beth Revis, returned to us with a story set in space, in the world of her Across the Universe series, while Veronica Roth created a new future where one can hear songs of life and songs of death. Carrie Ryan decided to unsettle us with a world facing a plague that gave at least one of the editors a case of the shivers. Other authors who are not writing near-future novels created worlds very different from their novels. Rachel Caine delivered a chilling story of advanced technology and age-old class divisions; likewise, Kami Garcia tackled questions of class in a society where the sun is deadly. And then Margaret Stohl and Nancy Holder came in and offered up stories of hope, glimmers of light among these shards and ashes.

  In this anthology, you will meet a mythological corpse eater and the Erl King, as well as reluctant heroes and those who are neither hero nor villain. You’ll walk in the swamp, desert, forest, and city. You’ll visit a ship hurtling through space, and a cavernous underground world. Without any planning beyond selecting the authors themselves, we’ve collected vastly different visions of dark futures. The one constant, in our editorial opinion, is that these are stories we feel fortunate to have read and to share with you.

  —Melissa & Kelley

  Hearken

  by Veronica Roth

  “BLACK OR RED?”

  The woman in the lab coat held up two small containers: one with a red substance caked inside it and one with black. It sounded like she was asking Darya a question of taste, rather than the question that defined her future. The only question, Darya believed, that would ever matter this much.

  The question was not “Black or red?” It was “Life or death?” And Darya would not have been able to answer before that moment.

  She had been seven years old when her father first realized what she could become. Her older sister, Khali, had been playing piano in the living room, an old piece by Schubert. Darya sat on the couch, humming along, a book in her lap.

  Her mother dozed in the recliner, her mouth lolling open. Darya thought about drawing a mustache on her face. She wouldn’t notice it when she awoke. She would be too dazed by the alcohol. Even at seven, Darya knew. But it was not uncommon, with the world as it was. Half her friends’ parents had the same problem.

  Darya’s father stood in the doorway, listening, a dish towel in his hands. He turned it over a plate to the rhythm of the notes, which came in stilted intervals as Khali tried to read the music. Darya stopped humming, irritated. The music was meant to be smooth, and it sounded like Khali was chopping it up into bits.

  Khali turned the page and adjusted her hands on the piano. Darya perked up, letting the book drop into her lap. Her mother snored. Her sister began playing, and Darya stood, walked over to the piano, and stared at her sister’s hands. To her the notes sounded wrong . . . the intervals were too large, or too small; they did not mesh together in the right way.

  “That’s wrong,” she said, wincing.

  “No it’s not,” said Khali. “How would you know?”

  “Because I can hear it,” she said. “It’s supposed to be like this.”

  She reached out and shifted her sister’s index finger one note over. Then she moved Khali’s pinkie finger, and her middle finger.

  “There,” said Darya. “Now do it.”

  Khali rolled her eyes and began the piece. Darya smiled as the notes came together, ringing when they touched each other.

  “Oh,” said Khali. Her skin was too dark to reveal a blush, but her sheepish expression betrayed her. “You’re right. I read it wrong. It’s supposed to be in B minor.”

  Darya smiled a little, walked back to the couch, and picked up her book again. Her father moved the towel in circles even when it started to squeak against the dry dish.

  A few weeks later, Darya’s father started her in music classes. There they discovered that Darya had perfect pitch—one of the prerequisites for becoming a Hearkener.

  Khali quit piano after Darya surpassed her in skill, which took only a year. It was useless to try to play piano when you were in the same family as a Hearkener.

  “Come on. Today’s the day!”

  Darya yawned over her cereal. It was too early to be hungry, but her father had warned her that she would need to eat a good breakfast because today would be a long one. She was going to be tested by the Minnesota School for Hearkeners later that morning to see if she was qualified to enroll, and the test could last several hours. That was a long time for an eight-year-old.

  Her mother shuffled into the kitchen in her old robe, which was threadbare at the cuffs where she pulled it over her hands. She held a mug of coffee, which Darya eyed suspiciously. Her mother had carried it into the bedroom several minutes ago.

  A few weeks before, Darya had found a brown bottle under the sink in her parents’ bathroom. She had sniffed it, and its contents burned her nose, and the smell seemed to linger there for several minutes. The bottle and the coffee and her mother’s running-together words were part of a familiar pattern that she had always recognized, even before she had the words to describe it.

  Her mother’s eyes wandered across Darya’s face.

  “Where’re you going?” she asked.

  “I’m taking Darya to get tested,” Darya’s father said, too brightly.

  “Tested for what?”

  “Dar has perfect pitch.” Her father set his hand on Darya’s head and tousled her hair. “She could be a Hearkener someday.”

  A Hearkener, to Darya’s mother, meant two things: being employed by the government—a stable job; and carrying an expensive piece of equipment, the implant, in your head—which meant immediate evacuation if the country was quarantined. She snorted a little.

  “D’you really think you should be putting that idea into her head?” Her mother’s eyes were cold and critical. Darya couldn’t look at them. “Almost nobody becomes an Ark . . . ’Arkener.”

  Darya stared at her bowl. The little bubble of excitement that had risen inside her as soon as she woke up was gone, like it had floated away.

  Her father rose and took her mother’s arm. “Maybe you should get back to bed, Reggie. You don’t look well.”

  “I just meant,” her mother said angrily, “that I don’t want her to be disappointed—”

  “I know,” he said.

  He ushered her from the room. Darya heard
the bedroom door close and muffled voices getting louder every second until something banged shut. No longer hungry, she dumped her cereal bowl into the sink without finishing.

  “Your mom’s not feeling so good, Dar,” her father said as they walked down the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. “She didn’t mean it.”

  Darya nodded without thinking.

  They would have lived in the suburbs if they could have—it was safer there, since the attacks came less frequently—but her father’s job only paid well enough for a small apartment downtown.

  The attacks had always been a part of Darya’s life. They could come from anyone, and they were waged against everyone with a pulse. That was why Darya and her sister had to wear face masks on the way to school.

  Her father had taught them both to know bio-bombs when they saw them, but their minds had a tendency to wander when they were together, and he didn’t trust them to look for bombs yet. Kids at school teased them for the masks, but they couldn’t persuade their father to let them go without. “Prove to me that you can pay attention,” he always said.

  Death was too real a possibility. Most people didn’t make it past fifty nowadays, even if they lived in the suburbs.

  Her father pulled her tight to his side as they walked, scattering old cans and bits of paper with the toes of their shoes. She craned her neck to see the tops of the buildings—they seemed so far away, though her father said they were shorter than the buildings in most cities. Most of the windows in the building next to her were blown out completely from the days when destructive bombs had been in fashion. But it was the loss of people, not buildings, that made a war destructive, and the fanatics had figured that out.

  They stopped walking and stood next to a blue sign marked with graffiti. Darya itched her leg with her free hand and gazed up at her father. He was not a tall man, nor was he short. His skin was dark brown, like Darya’s, and his hair was black and smooth, shiny like her hair, too. He had moved to the States from India before the quarantine. India had been one of the first countries targeted when the attacks began because of its condensed population. Now the infection was so rampant that the borders had to be closed to prevent a worldwide epidemic. Her father’s parents had gotten infected, so they hadn’t been able to leave with him. She had never met her grandparents. She assumed they were dead by now.

  “Will the test be hard, Daddy?”

  He smiled. “Most of it will be things you already know how to do. And the rest you will be able to figure out. Don’t worry, Dar. You’ll do great.”

  A bus trundled around the corner as he finished speaking, and creaked to a stop right in front of them. The doors opened, and Darya’s father paid the fare. They sat down in the middle, next to an old lady who was shifting her dentures around in her mouth, and across from a middle-aged man with a mask covering his mouth and nose.

  Her father leaned in close and whispered, “Okay, so what do we do when we get on a train or a bus?”

  “Look for masks,” she whispered back. They would have been wearing masks too, if they had not had to leave the two they owned for Darya’s mother, who had to walk Khali to school later, and Khali. Masks were expensive. But she was safe with her father, who could spot a bio-bomb anywhere.

  “Why do we do that?”

  “Because only people with masks will set off bio-bombs.” Her voice dipped even lower at the word bio-bombs, as if saying it any louder would provoke an attack.

  “Right,” he said, “and after we look for masks, what do we do?”

  “We watch.”

  The enemy could be anyone, anywhere. All that bound them together was a commitment to bringing about the apocalypse. They believed the world ought to be destroyed. They did not believe in ending their own lives. Darya didn’t understand it and didn’t want to try.

  He nodded. And they watched, both of them, as the bus bumped and thudded around corners and down streets. Darya had not seen much of the city because she spent all her travel time eyeing the people around her. She was usually in a bus, rather than a train, because buses were easier to escape from.

  “You know, when I was young, people didn’t like Hearkeners much,” her father said.

  Darya watched the man across from her. His eyes remained steady on the floor. She could hear his breaths through the slats in the mask—not loud, but louder than unfiltered breaths.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because they were seen as an unnecessary expenditure,” he said. “Not worth the cost, I mean. But the people over at the Bureau for the Promotion of Arts were very insistent that music would help a troubled world. And then when people started dying . . .” He shrugged. “Everyone started to understand why Hearkeners were so important.”

  “Why are they so important?”

  “Because what they hear . . . it’s like hearing something beyond us. Something bigger than us.” He smiled down at her. “It reminds us that there’s more going on in this world than we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands.”

  Darya didn’t quite understand what her father meant, but she knew there was something beautiful in it all the same.

  Then she heard something—quickening breaths from the man across from them. She saw a bead of sweat roll down the side of his forehead. He looked so harmless—he was short, with salt-and-pepper hair and a white, collared shirt. His slacks were pressed, creased. He was not a killer. But the peculiar blend of fear and determination in his eyes was enough to make Darya’s breaths stop completely.

  As the man in the mask moved to get off the bus, he took a canister from his bag and dropped it on the ground. It was an object she had only seen in pictures—dull metal, about six inches long, as thick as her wrist, with an opening at one end to let out the gas.

  Someone screamed. Darya’s father clapped his hand over her mouth and nose, and lifted her up from the abdomen. He ran toward the front of the bus, shoving people out of his way with his elbows. Darya fought for air, but the hand prevented her from taking a breath.

  Her father shouldered his way out the bus door. Against her will, Darya’s body began to struggle against her father’s grasp, fighting for air. Her father sprinted down the street and into an alley just as she began to see spots.

  He took his hand from her mouth, and she gasped.

  He had not had time to cover his own mouth. What if he inhaled some of the gas? What if he was infected? She choked on a sob. What if he died?

  “It’s okay, Dar.” He gathered her close to his chest. “I held my breath. We’re all right. We’re just fine.”

  Technically, the only distinguishing feature of a Hearkener was the implant. It was placed in the temporal lobe of the brain. It didn’t protrude from the skin, but it contained a dye that created a weblike pattern on the right temple. Hearkeners were required to pull their hair away from their faces to reveal the pattern. Its purpose was to make them easily identifiable.

  The implant made them what they were. They heard music everywhere—as long as there were people, there was music.

  The first time she saw a licensed Hearkener was outside the Minnesota School for Hearkeners, on the fifth step from the bottom of thirty long, low steps. They had not made it to the testing center the day of the bio-bomb, but they went three days later, this time walking the whole way instead of taking the bus.

  Her father stood beside her, clutching her hand. They both paused to watch the Hearkener woman walk past.

  She was tall and slender, with hair the color of earth and the same pale skin Darya’s mother had. She walked without a bounce in her step, but at the same time, her feet were light on the cement. She wore a knee-length coat that snapped when the wind caught it. The pattern on her temple was iodine black, but it was the last thing Darya noticed.

  All Darya could think was that this Hearkener of Death was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, and she wanted to be just like her.

  As the Hearkener passed Darya and her father, she tilted her he
ad, the way a person does when he is trying to hear something. Her footsteps slowed for just a moment, and she closed her eyes.

  After the moment passed, she looked Darya’s father in the eye and smiled. Despite the curl of her lips, a troubled look remained in her eyes. She kept walking.

  Three weeks later, Darya’s father died of the infection, and that Hearkener was the only person who ever heard his death song.

  Darya passed the test, and her mother enrolled her in the Minnesota School for Hearkeners that fall. Though Darya’s mind was still muddled with grief, it was what her father had wanted for her, so she went.

  Her first impression of the place was that it was too large for her. Even the front steps were vast, made of wide slabs of a dark, matte stone. The building itself was tall, made of black glass with girders that formed a huge X across the front. A giant clock, fixed to the front of the building, told her she had five minutes to get to her first class.

  She looked at the piece of paper the school had sent her, along with half a dozen packets and information sheets, to tell her where to go on her first day. All the new students took classes together until they tested into particular levels of musical study or until they chose their instrument specialties.

  The schedule said: Hour 1, Introduction to Hearkener History, Room A104.

  Darya looked up when she passed through the doors. She couldn’t see much past the security barrier. A stern-looking man in a black uniform told her to put her bag on a black conveyor belt that would take it through a scanner. She then had to stand in what looked like a globe with a tunnel cut through it so that it could scan her body. She had gone through both when she took her tests here, but her father had been with her then. This time she was afraid. What if they didn’t let her through?

  But another man, on the other side, handed her the bag and let her pass him. The hallway here was completely different from the dingy, green-tiled hall that had been in her old school. Here, the floors were white marble—or at least something that looked like marble—and the walls were navy blue. Even the lockers were elegant—made of dark wood, they lined the walls as far as she could see.