Dumpster. For a child as young as you were then, shape-shifting is the same as dreaming, you know? It’s all make-believe!”
“She was my big sister! She took care of me!” Milo’s face, like his throat, was tightening into a knot.
“She read to me. She tucked me in at night.”
Sylvie shook her head. “Milo! Milo!”
All at once, it was too much-the arch of Sylvie’s brow, Dr. Devore’s sad smile, the sweet warmth of Sylvie’s hand stroking his head. Milo braved the pain in his stomach and bolted upright. “I’m no good!
I’m some kind of monster, is all! You don’t understand!”
Sylvie tried to hold him, but he swung his legs over the side of the makeshift bed and pulled away from her. He flinched and started to double over, then braced himself and ran to the window, clutching the sheet about him. Devore followed him.
Milo pressed his forehead against the glass. “She wanted me to kill that guy. It wasn’t the first time. The guy wouldn’t do what she wanted. I was the only one who always did what she wanted-except just that once. I didn’t mean to kill her, though!”
“You didn’t kill her, you jerk!” Sylvie was crying too now. “It was the goddamn mountain lion, Milo! It wasn’t your fault!”
Milo pushed open the window and leaned out. He let his head hang, panting, dripping tears. Tears slid down his nose and cheeks and chin. “I could jump. I deserve it.”
Devore’s hand on his shoulder. “You already tried that, Milo. Inside you, you’re too smart, you’re too good to do that to yourself. When you jump, Milo, you fly! In your heart you know you must live.
Dedeused you, Milo. You protected yourself.”
“Why are you so good to me? Nobody’s ever been so good to me!” He turned around, trusting them to see his face, so ugly, he thought, with tears and spasms of grief.
“We just want to look out for you, Milo.” Sylvie cupped his cheek, wet with tears, in the palm of her hand, and all at once his ugliness vanished: he didn’t look like anything, he was only this touch, this gazing into Sylvie’s gaze. It wasn’t a shape-shifter’s trick but the most human thing he had ever felt.
“We all look out for one another,” she said. “We’re all finding out what we are, what we can do.”
Like a knot pulled free, Milo’s breath shuddered once, then steadied. The sheet wrapped around him opened slightly: his movement had irritated the wound, and blood trickled below the dressing.
“Take a good look, Sylvie,” Devore said, “and next time you need pin money, ask me.”
“I said I was sorry,” she said, “and I meant it. But I can’t be told what to do, not by you, not by anybody. I got my own plans, you know. Your fellowship won’t take me to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival or Amsterdam for the Festival of Fools or to the Carnival in Venice or any of those other big venues that are goddam dying to experience the Moon and Stars!” Devore half-smiled, looked down, and shook his head.
Milo blinked. For a split second, Dede was there, pale and doughy. She was lingering in the corner with a hangdog look. She wasn’t as big as Milo used to think, nor as subtle. As his big sister, then as a nameless forbidden dream, she had been mighty: volcanoes, oceans, storming skies, or a hot dry wind.
Now she was just a shadow. “You used me, Dede! I was just a baby, and you were my big sister! Oh, Dede, you shouldn’t have done that! That wasn’t right!” Bookish, wan, small-hearted, eaten up by jealousy and desire, she simply faded from view.
Milo had been whispering to himself, he realized. He caught Sylvie and Devore’s eyes on him; they looked away, embarrassed for him perhaps, but Milo didn’t mind that they had heard him.We all look out for one another, Sylvie had said.We! There were others like him! Milo breathed. Milo breathed. He wasinnocent.
He felt like someone suddenly waking after a long fever and rummaging for food. “Tell me about the painting in the waiting room. Is it…somebody?”
“Yes,” said Devore. “I guess you’d have to say so. At least, shewas somebody. She seems to be caught in there, like Narcissus staring into the lake. We can’t get her back. Maybe she doesn’twant to come back.”
Milo shut his eyes; tears streamed down his cheeks.
Sylvie squeezed his hand. “Milo…?”
“I was caught like that, Sylvie. I belonged to Dede, even though she was dead. She said I’d be all hers forever.”
“Milo, you’re going to be allyours forever,” said Devore. “We’re going to see to it. We’re going to teach you everything. And you’re going to teach us, too.”
“Yes, I will.” Milo took Sylvie’s other hand in his. He looked at her, then at Devore, then Sylvie again.
He had the extraordinary sensation of recognizinghimself behind their eyes. “I love you, both of you!” he blurted out.
Sylvie smiled. Her face sparkled so, he thought he was looking at the moon and stars.
Snowball in Hell - Brian Stableford
From the very beginning I had a niggling feeling that the operation was going to go wrong, but I put it down to nerves. Scientific advisors to the Home Office rarely get a chance to take part in Special Branch operations, and I always knew that it would be my first and last opportunity to be part of a real Boy’s Own adventure.
I calmed my anxieties by telling myself that the police must know what they were doing. The plan looked so neat and tidy when it was laid out on the map with colored dots: blue for the lower ranks, red for the Armed Response Unit, green for the likes of yours truly and black for the senior Special Branch officers who were supervising and coordinating the whole thing. We deeply resented the fact that the reports from the surveillance team had been carefully censored, according to the sacred principle of NEED TO KNOW, but there seemed to be no obvious reason to suppose that the raid itself wouldn’t go like clockwork.
“But what are they actually supposed to havedone, exactly?” one of my juniors was reckless enough to ask.
“If we knewexactly,” came the inevitable withering reply, “we wouldn’t need to include you in the operation, would we?”
I could tell from the reports we had been allowed to see that the so-called investigation into the experiments at Hollinghurst Manor had been a committee product, and that no one had ever had a clear idea exactly what was going on. Warrants for surveillance had been obtained on the grounds that the Branch’s GE-Crime Unit had “compelling reasons” to suspect that Drs. Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby were using “human genetic material” in the creation of “transgenic animals,” but it was mostly speculation. What they really had to go on was gossip and
