After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

As monsters we were pitiable—it was beyond our control. As Rehabilitated we are just like everyone else except in every way that matters, which means we could be discarded without a second thought. Alive but only allowed to live among the fringes.

I stare at how James trembles, his chin dimpled with terror, and I wonder if that’s what’s left of us. We uphold the weak and push down the survivors. He was right: the living sequester themselves in compounds while the rest of us roam the world.

One day, we could own the world if we devised it to be so.

There’s a moment when I think about opening the door and letting them have him. Making him one of us. Giving him the ultimate freedom.

The most perfect kind of love.

And then the first creature strips the wood from the frame and they are upon us, and all I can do is shoot, over and over again, as the bodes pile around me. For a moment there is screaming, a painful kind of rage that goes beyond the normal wails in the night. The air fills with the smell of terror and regret, and eventually silence wraps around us both.

They had names once, before, the creatures spread around me. Then they were pack, which meant names became useless. And now we are nothing, lesser than. How many of the bodies lying still at my feet would have chosen this? If they’d had the choice, what would they have wanted?

Will any of them stand in the darkness of a Sanitation Center and listen to the howls of those still out there and feel the tug of their blood, calling them to a home that can never be theirs again?

There were reports shortly after the cure was first administered, of Rehabilitated trying to reinfect themselves. They wanted to go back, they explained; though it didn’t take long for them to realize there’s no such thing. Once you’re cured, you’re cured forever.

The scientists locked them in cells deep in their research labs to study their brain patterns, to subject them to endless rounds of therapy, trying to understand why anyone would choose to become a monster.

None of those scientists ever understood what it was to exist in the between of something, and none of us could ever explain it, so we gave up trying. We learned to keep our dreams to ourselves, to swallow back the way our mouths watered when we heard the wail of monsters in the darkness.

We learned to survive alone, with a wanting deeper than hunger.

“I’m sorry.” James kneels behind me, vomit pooling around his knees. “I didn’t know how fast the darkness would fall under the smoke tonight.”

Absently, I shake my head. One glance of sunlight kills the monsters. We knew the turning of the earth in a way more intimate than our own blood. It’s what kept us alive, and it’s unfathomable that the Pure can’t do the same. As if they can’t understand true fear and mortality.

“Will they be okay?” he asks, eyes trained on the body of a girl wedged in the door frame, her breath coming in short pants and eyes wavering behind lids.

I have no idea how to answer that question. There are a million definitions of okay, and none of them seem to fit this moment. “They’ll send someone from the Sanitation Center.” And then I remember the fire, and add, “If there’s anyone left. They’ll all become Rehabilitated. Like me.”

James pushes to his feet and skirts the puddle of spreading vomit. Already the cure’s finding its way into their systems, fighting against the monster and turning them back to the closest thing to normal we can decipher.

“Did you know them?” he asks.

I shake my head. As human beings, we were as diverse as the days, but as pack, we were one. The moment I was shot with the cure, they became strangers.

He must sense the despair threading through me, because he slips his fingers around my own and holds them tight. “Why did you save me? You could have let them in. Let them take me and then released them back out to the darkness.”

For a long time I think about his question: whether I’d have loaded the last cure-tranq into the gun and leveled it at his back as he ran. What it would have been like to lose him to the pack. At night he’d have streamed past my house with the others, and just like them, he’d maybe pause to sniff the air at something passing familiar before pounding on until dawn.

As a human, he knows me in a way he’d never remember as a monster.

“Because you came for me when none of them did.”

VALEDICTORIAN by N. K. Jemisin

THERE ARE THREE THINGS ZINHLE DECIDES, WHEN SHE IS OLD enough to understand. The first is that she will never, ever give less than her best to anything she tries to do. The second is that she will not live in fear. The third, which is perhaps meaningless, given the first two, and yet comes to define her existence most powerfully, is this: she will be herself. No matter what.

For however brief a time.

“Have you considered getting pregnant?” her mother blurts one morning, over breakfast.

Zinhle’s father drops his fork, but he recovers and picks it up again quickly. This is how Zinhle knows that what her mother has said is not a spontaneous burst of insanity. They have discussed the matter, her parents. They are in agreement. Her father was just caught off guard by the timing.

But Zinhle, too, has considered the matter in depth. Do they really think she wouldn’t have? “No,” she says.

Zinhle’s mother is stubborn. This is where Zinhle herself gets the trait. “The Sandersens’ boy—you used to play with him when you were little, remember?—he’s decent. Discreet. He got three girls pregnant last year, and doesn’t charge much. The babies aren’t bad-looking. And we’d help you with the raising, of course.” She hesitates, then adds, with obvious discomfort, “A friend of mine at work—Charlotte, you’ve met her—she says he’s, ah, he’s not rough or anything, doesn’t try to hurt girls—”

“No,” Zinhle says again, more firmly. She does not raise her voice. Her parents taught her to be respectful of her elders. She believes respect includes being very, very clear about some things.

Zinhle’s mother looks at her father, seeking an ally. Her father is a gentle, soft-spoken man in a family of strong-willed women. Stupid people think he is weak; he isn’t. He just knows when a battle isn’t worth fighting. So he looks at Zinhle now, and after a moment he shakes his head. “Let it go,” he says to her mother, and her mother subsides.

They resume breakfast in silence.

Zinhle earns top marks in all her classes. The teachers exclaim over this, her parents fawn, the school officials nod their heads sagely and try not to too-obviously bask in her reflected glory. There are articles about her in the papers and on Securenet. She wins awards.

She hates this. It’s easy to perform well; all she has to do is try. What she wants is to be the best, and this is difficult when she has no real competition. Beating the others doesn’t mean anything, because they’re not really trying. This leaves Zinhle with no choice but to compete against herself. Each paper she writes must be more brilliant than the last. She tries to finish every test faster than she did before. It isn’t the victory she craves, not exactly; the satisfaction she gains from success is minimal. Barely worth it. But it’s all she has.

The only times she ever gets in trouble are when she argues with her teachers, because they’re so often wrong. Infuriatingly, frustratingly wrong. In the smallest part of her heart, she concedes that there is a reason for this: a youth spent striving for mediocrity does not a brilliant adult make. Old habits are hard to break, old fears are hard to shed, all that. Still—arguing with them, looking up information and showing it to them to prove their wrongness, becomes her favorite pastime. She is polite, always, because they expect her to be uncivilized, and because they are also her elders. But it’s hard. They’re old enough that they don’t have to worry, damn it; why can’t they at least try to be worthy of her effort? She would kill for one good