The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

your locker. The sweatshirt is yours, isn’t it? Take off that T-shirt and put this on. It’s none too clean, but you can’t walk around looking like a gory movie zombie. Then you must leave a note for your family. Say you’ve gone to seek your fortune.”

Thoughts lit up like silent sheet lightning in his mind while he worked the blood-crusted T-shirt off over his head.

His life, his friends, his home—all that was over, and she’d just been trying to get rid of him when she’d said, before, about killing his parents. But there was no going back. The upside was, he would be getting out of here at last, traveling with Odette out into the real world.

Was that why he felt high, instead of all bleak and tortured about waking up undead?

Then it hit him: undead? He was finally going to get to live.

He punched the air and whooped. “Look out, Colin Meloy! Josh Burnham’s songs are coming down!”

Pawing around inquisitively in the tote bag, Odette glanced up. “Forget about your songs, Josh. You died. The undead do not create: not babies, not art, not music, not even recipes or dress designs. I’m sorry, but that’s our reality.”

“You don’t get it!” he crowed. “Listen, I’m still a beginner, but I’m good—I know I am. Now I have years— centuries even—to turn myself into the best damn singer-songwriter ever! So what if I never mature past where I am now, like you said about Crystal? Staying young is success in the music business! I can use the Eye to get top players to work with me, to teach me—”

“You can learn skills,” she said with forced patience. “You can imitate. But you can’t create, not even if you used to have the genius of a budding Sondheim, which you did not. According to Crystal, your lyrical gift was… let’s say, minor. I hope you’re not going to be tiresome about this, Josh.”

“Crystal’s just jealous!” Buoyed by the exhilaration of getting some payback at last for his weeks of helpless servitude, he shouted, “You’re jealous! She told me about you, how you made jewelry for rich people—”

Odette snapped, “That’s someone else. I designed tapestries. As a new made, you’re entitled to a little rudeness, but at least take the trouble to get the facts right.”

“But the thing is, you were already old—your talent was all used up by the time you got turned, wasn’t it? So now you can’t stand to admit that anybody else still has it!”

“My talent,” she said icily, “which was not just considerable but still unfolding, was extinguished completely and forever—just like yours—when I became what you are now.” She fixed him with a dragon glare and hissed, “Stupid boy, why do you think I collect?”

He almost laughed: What was this, some weird horror-movie version of fighting with his mother? Fine, he was stoked. “It’s different for me! I’m just getting started, and now I can go on getting better and better forever!”

With a shrug, she turned back to the contents of the tote bag. “You can try; who knows, you might even have some commercial success—”

She stopped, holding up a fantasy-style chalice he’d made in ceramics class at the arts center. It was a sagging blob that couldn’t even stand solidly on its crooked foot.

“What’s this?”

“You should know,” he muttered, embarrassed. “You’re the expert on valuable things. It’s arts and crafts, that’s all, from back when I was still trying to find my way, my art. I brought all that stuff in here to try to sell it, only I forgot—I’ve been kind of distracted, you know?”

“You made this.” She ran the ball of her thumb along the thickly glazed surface, which he had decorated with sloppy swirls of lemon and indigo.

“So what?” he said. “Here, just toss that whole bag of crap.” There was a trash can outside the office door. He shoved it toward her with his foot.

Odette gently put the cup aside. She reached back into the tote bag and drew from the bottom a wad of crumpled fabric.

Oh, no, not that damned needlepoint!

In his fiber arts class, he had been crazy enough to try to reproduce an Aztec cape, brilliant with the layered feathers of tropical birds, like one he’d seen in the museum. He’d just learned the basic diagonal stitch, so the rectangular canvas had warped into a diamond-like shape. Worse, frustrated that the woolen yarns weren’t glossy enough, he’d added splinters of metal, glazed pottery, and glass, shiny bits and pieces knotted and sewn onto the unevenly stitched surface.

That wiseass Mickey Craig had caught him working on it once and had teased him for “sewing, like a girl.” That was when Josh had quit the class and hidden the unfinished canvas in his closet where nobody would ever see it.

Yeah; his luck.

Maybe he could convince Odette that his mother had made it.

“God in heaven,” Odette said flatly. “God. In. Heaven. If I ever catch up with that girl, I will tear off her head.”

Her eyes glared from a face tense with fury; but he saw a shine of moisture on her cheek.

Odette was crying.

And there it was, the kernel of the first great song of his undead life, a soul-ripping blast about losing everything and winning everything, to mark the end of his last summer as a miserable, live human kid: “Tears of a Vampire.” All he had to do was come up with a couple of starter lines, and then find a tune to work with.

All he had to do was… why couldn’t he think?

All he had to do… his thoughts hung cool and still as settled fog. He found himself staring at the crude, lumpy canvas, vivid and glowing, stretched between Odette’s bony fists.

He began to see it, this cockeyed thing that his own fumbling, amateurish hands had made. Its grimy, raveling edges framed a rich fall of parrot-bright colors, all studded with glittering fragments.

He hadn’t even finished it, but it was beautiful.

Oh, he thought. Oh…

This was it—this was what he should have been doing all along—not drawing comics or struggling with song lyrics, but crafting this kind of mind-blowing interplay of colors, shapes, and textures. This was his true art, his breakout talent.

So why couldn’t he picture it as a finished piece? He stretched his eyes wide open, squinted them almost shut, but he could only see it right there in front of him exactly as it was, abandoned and incomplete. His mind, flat and gray and quiet, offered nothing, except for a faint but rising tremor of dread.

Because although he couldn’t describe the stark look on Odette’s face in clever lyrics anymore, he understood it perfectly now—from the inside. It was the expression of someone staring into an endless future of absolute sterility, unable to produce one single creation of originality, beauty, or inspiration ever again.

If Josh wanted all that back—originality, inspiration, and beauty, only everything he had ever really wanted— he would have to get it the same way that Odette, or any of the Quality, got it.

He would have to begin collecting.

THE CHOICE Paul McAuley

In the night, tides and a brisk wind drove a raft of bubbleweed across the Flood and piled it up along the north side of the island. Soon after first light, Lucas started raking it up, ferrying load after load to one of the compost pits, where it would rot down into a nutrient-rich liquid fertilizer. He was trundling his wheelbarrow down the steep path to the shore for about the thirtieth or fortieth time when he spotted someone walking across the water: Damian, moving like a cross-country skier as he traversed the channel between the island and the stilt huts