And It Devours by M. K. Dreysen

Tonight, reader, I ask you to turn your eye to the red planet.

To contemplate what may yet come to be. Who will go. What they might do there.

And... what may be demanded of them. This week's free story is one that I call

And It Devours by M. K. Dreysen

The beast is massive, it consumes. It crawls across the crusted desert, and it eats what it finds there. Eats it, digests it, dribbles out the processed material so that the world the beast helps build may grow to be something not quite so dusty and empty of life.

The treads move, and then only grudgingly, on decadal cycles. The caverns behind and beneath, away from the beast's mass, grow only so far, so fast. Eaten out by the action of one precious gram of water at a time. The water flows through the hoses the miners wield, out and back to the drain and the sump and the pump.

Into the beast's maw. Where the water is released of its cargo, evaporated, condensed; sent down hole again to restart the process. Every gram is sacred, of water and salt and the other minerals that come along with them.

Every liter of new empty volume below the crust is venerated, as well. Along the beaded trail the beast has worn into the mineral crater's surface, every second kilometer holds a cavern. Filling, with structure, with life. Down below where the radiation can't.

Chris-Jian Wan crawls the beast's pipes like he owns the place. Steam pipes, big ones, the relief passages for pressure and heat. They're shut down, now. Mostly.

Temperature doing its thing on the surface, the evaporators can't be shut down completely. The alloys are marvelous. They hold up to so very many attacks. But thermal stress is a stress, so the steam lines stay lit, just a little.

Enough to keep the pipes warm. And covered in a faint sheen of condensation. Chris wipes it away so he might gauge how well the pipes are doing. Corrosion? Pitting? Wear marks as the alloys wear in just that little bit more?

The engineers had built for a century, that's what the electronic books all say. Diagrams and materials lists, calculations and assumptions discussed. The beast should live for a century more, with care.

Chris is one of the ones doing the care these days. With a little help from Jen Nguyen. She keeps watch at the access hole while Chris mumbles to himself. "A little pan scale here," Chris notes.

"Got it," Jen answers over the suit radio. She's also taking notes, so the maintenance crews know what Chris and Jen are adding to the ever present list of preventative. "Where?"

"Fifteen centimeters," and then Chris pauses, to look at the drawings on the tablet. "Fifteen centimeters to the steam scrubber side of the first field weld." First one past where the pipe turns horizontal coming out of the top of the vessel.

Jen taps the location and description into her tablet while Chris brushes the scale. The alloys here don't corrode, they're not subject to chloride attack. Where'd the scale come from, then? Chris rubs the material between gloved fingers, trying as best he could to feel the grain of it.

Sandy, uniform. Chris grunted at that, then pulled a sample bottle from his tool case. "This one's probably on the operators, we'll need to talk to them about the past ninety days, how they've been cycling."

"Ok, think they're running hot?"

Chris shrugged. "Not paying attention to the lab reports, more like." The ones that told the beast's unit operators what sort of mineral composition would be coming up the feed. The beast fed on natural materials.

The kind that varied in composition.

Sometimes, the sandy buildup Chris filled the test bottle with testified to, sometimes more than a little. Enough so that the operators should have adjusted their pressures and temperatures, and feed chemicals, to account for it. "Looks like a sulfate, or maybe borate."

"You'll have to explain how you carry that around in your head," Jen complained.

"Say it that way and it'll turn out to be something we've never seen before. I've been here long enough to make all the mistakes, Jen, that's all it is." And then some. Before he left it, Chris took pictures of the scale, from a couple different angles.

And cussed himself in the vaults of his mind. For not taking the pictures first, before he'd wiped the grit into an anonymous swirl. Another mistake, maybe, but the lab results would show whether he'd screwed up enough to matter. Chris put it out of his mind and went on to the next weld in the pipe.

He'd anticipated the end of the rope lining up with the end of the shift. The recovery line that Jen played out, the one she'd use to drag Chris back to the hole if something went wrong. Only, Chris didn't find anything else to bother the maintenance team with.

Good for them; the beast shut down once a year, for boiler and steam line inspections, and to catch up on all the pieces that had gone funny over the last year. Pipe leaks, frozen valves, the little aggravations. Maintenance always came away with a list.

One that Chris didn't really want to be longer than it had to be. Because anything on the list meant something he'd have to follow up with.

He crawled out of the hole and sat down next to Jen on the crawlway. "Your turn," he said after a few minutes of silence.

"Shit."

Chris played out the rope for the next hour or so, listening to Jen's running commentary. He tried to keep his mouth shut. Jen spotted a couple more, smaller, scale deposits.

"Young eyes," Chris muttered as he tapped the locations into his tablet. And back and knees and other joints. Then, his aching joints complained only in Chris's head.

Crap floating into the steam scrubbers brought complaints and issues from others. But that part of the inspection carried tomorrow's number. For now, for this end of shift, Jen crawled back out of the hole to sit and recover.

They walked the kilometer back to the locker rooms in more or less companionable silence. Chris didn't have to work hard to remember what he'd felt like, those first couple of years.

Dumb as a post. Lost. Knowing someone would decide that, really, they'd made a mistake somewhere, sorry, you'll have to go down to the mines, or maybe grab a broom and get sweeping, those are about the only jobs you're qualified for.

He knew better now. The mining jobs took a hell of a lot more work and thought than he'd ever have known, fresh out of school. And they'd switched to robot janitorial years before the beast ever took its final form. But the young engineer with more worries and insecurities than experience really hadn't known that then.

And when he'd found out... well, Chris-Jian hadn't slept well for a month after. What did that mean for his mother? And her job? But the mail did come in, somewhat regularly. And Mom's voice and face did continue to come through his helmet's display, like it did now while he and Jen made their way to shower and get out of the damned exposure suits.

"Chris-Jian, thank you for writing. Your sister's eldest has recovered, thank God, she needs some physical therapy but the doctors assure Lin-Eve that Molly will eventually be completely back to normal." Mom went on through her own social maintenance list.

When he'd first come to the beast, Chris had tried to keep up with his mother's network in something like real time. Cousins, neighbors, Lin. He'd made it about six or seven months before he'd had to change tactics; if one of Mom's stories later turned significant, Chris went back through his archives and replayed the videos.

Played Mom's messages at twice speed, asked after Lin and Molly, and now Molly's new baby Grace-Yi, and whichever of the neighbors or cousins sounded like interesting this week.

Jen held up a hand and stopped. Chris turned around, questioning with a shrug, until he remembered to turn off Mom's message and switch over to the beast's live feed. "Charlie's body has been placed in cold storage in the locker room, waiting your report. Please advise."

And by you, someone clearly meant Chris. Hell. So much for getting done in reasonable time. "Yeah, we're almost there," Chris replied. "How about the site?"

He figured that was safe enough. Wherever Charlie'd been discovered was a site. Someone had to have done at least a little bit to secure it, from the random eyeballs going by at soon-to-be shift change if nothing else. "Defu is there. He asks that you hurry."

Of course, Chris didn't say. The old man's as ready to leave for the day as everyone else. "Will do." He didn't say anything further, in favor of walking faster.

Jen kept pace, and mouth shut, until they stood over Charlie Wen Hai's body. Safely stored away in a refrigerated cart. "Regretting lunch yet?" Chris asked her.

"We ate before, not after," Jen reminded him.

"Right." Chris wasn't coroner or detective.

Then, nobody on the beast held those titles. Chris did, however, lay claim to "Health, Safety, and Environmental Technical Projects Manager".

Jumped up engineer. Because the beast's organization required titles if Chris wanted certain people to listen.

He'd found out after he got that particular title, among the others, that it meant he was the one they sent the dead to. And the job of discovering what precisely had happened to them.

Hai's body had been stuffed naked into the refrigerator cabinet, a wheeled contraption that should have been serving duty in the canteen. "Where's his suit?" Chris asked.

"Probably with Defu," Jen answered.

Chris grunted, leaned over into the cabinet, and looked for... anything.

Jen took out her tablet and started making notes, just as she had at the steam pipe. "Why do they bring these to you?"

"The same reason they bring me in when a vessel collapses or the mines hit an unstable stretch of mineral. Something went wrong, and I'm the one who's been put in the position of figuring out what it was."

"And fixing it so it doesn't happen again."

"Yeah. Hmm, there's bruising around his wrists." Chris looked around the locker room until he found the box of gloves.

Super-sized latex monstrosities that went over the suit gloves; he didn't need the boot covers, but they were hidden somewhere under one of the benches, as well. Their purpose being to let people go in and out of the conditioned spaces without de-suiting if they didn't have to.

Chris offered Jen a pair of the gloves, slid his on, then grabbed Charlie's hands at the base of the dead man's fingers.

Chris fumbled a bit, tired, until his finger found the button on his own tablet, the one that took the pictures. When the camera caught up, he laid the hand down to examine the rest of Charlie's body.

"Matching set of bruises on the ankles," he finally said, once he'd got that far. Jen scribbled her notes while Chris continued his process.

And then, finished, Chris made her switch places with him. "I'd try and save it for another day, but really, it could be years before we see another death."

Thirty-five years and Chris had done this only twice before. For a team of five hundred, Chris was awfully proud of that, and the team for working that safely. Back under full gravity, that kind of record was unheard of.

Here? Huoxing, where a bad seal on your suit meant unconsciousness, frostbite, worse if nobody noticed?

Chris made himself be even more careful to keep any hint of an opinion out of his voice as Jen made her observations, he took his notes, and she then took her pictures. "They're pressure ligatures, aren't they?" she asked, at the end.

Where the suits had clamped down to try and maintain core integrity. Better to lose a hand to frostbite and exposure than suffocate and die. The suits didn't have quite the job that a full vacuum suit did. Huoxing did hold an atmosphere, if cold and thin.

On the other hand, the beast's environment wasn't a benign walk in a sunny park, either. But the suit's sophistication amounted only to a running series of "Pressure good, temperature good?" questions.

Chris, and Jen now, knew the suits well. They had to, in order to understand what the maintenance team's reports meant. And whether they'd been decertifying an unusual number of suits recently. As they had. "Let's get to Defu, and quick. He'll know, or know who took Charlie out of his suit and can tell us."

"Means he was dead before the suit lost complete pressure," Jen muttered to herself as the pair jogged to Charlie's warehouse.

Chris was glad then of the suit, and the height difference. Jen's head and shoulders advantage over him meant she couldn't see the proud smile that threatened to cross his face as his junior partner worried the problem and formed her own guesses.

"Where, Defu?"

"Second floor, southeast corner."

Charlie's space was, had been, the parts warehouses. If you needed a part, Charlie was the one who knew where it actually was. As opposed to where the computers thought it should be. Chris and Jen climbed the stairs to the second level and walked to the back.

Defu sat on top of an old crate, a lean tall orange-dusted suit that unfolded himself as Chris and Jen came down the crosswalk.

Chris kept his grin to himself. Defu, second in command of the beast, the only remaining hand on the crawler who'd been at it longer than Chris. "What do you have, Defu?"

The older man gestured to the crate; more particularly, to the back side. "Zhe Huang found Charlie's body. She said he didn't show up for lunch, so she went looking for him after."

The crate, and the pallet it rested on, sat next to the guardrail. The second level of the warehouse was a twenty meter-wide ribbon running around the walls, with the middle open to the floor below. Defu pointed to the space between the crate of parts and the rail system. "Here."

"Do you have pictures?"

"Check your mail."

Chris and Jen both did that; the pictures showed that Huang had found Charlie's body lying half on the crate, half in the crevice behind it.

"And the suit?" Jen asked.

Defu stepped away; he'd laid the suit out next to the crate. Chris and Jen moved up together.

The gloves and the boots showed the damage the ligatures on Charlie's body had testified to. The palms of the gloves had been burned away, and holes torn-burned through the arches of the boots.

While Jen took pictures and made notes, Chris looked around the second floor. "What was he standing on, then?"

Defu grunted. "That's why you're here, isn't it?"

Chris swallowed the comment he wanted to make. "Did Huang know what Charlie was working on?"

"Inventory. I've asked the warehouse crew to keep up with the maintenance list, so we know what can be done with parts on hand."

Chris nodded. Jen, himself, the outside inspectors, could put together all the lists they wanted to. Defu and operations determined when and how it all would come together.

Charlie's suit, the burns, told Chris that electricity was involved. Somewhere in the crates and storage shelves, Charlie had touched a bare line. The shelves, for the smaller parts that could be broken out that way, ran perpendicular to the walls.

And the rolling ladder steps, portable stairs on wheels, that Charlie and the others used to reach the higher shelves... they sat some five meters or so away. Chris looked up.

This warehouse had only the two levels. Above, six or so meters, the angled iron framing of the roof defined the rest of the space. And all the electrical conduits, for the warehouse and the secondary processing units the warehouse shared a wall with.

Chris pulled up the electrical drawings on his tablet. Then, he fed them to his suit's display.

The ceiling above lit up now; red showed Chris the 110 volt lines, blue the 220, green the 440. Or, at least, the colors indicated where the electrical engineers thought the lines ran to and from.

Chris pulled a line meter from his tool case. The suit couldn't, of itself, read the field lines. The meter, once he plugged it into the suit, changed that. Chris walked around, tapping the meter on steel until he found one that connected fully to the warehouse's ground.

The meter, once his suit accommodated its feed, told Chris two things. One, that the rolling stairway wasn't currently energized. And two, that one of the 220 lines didn't run where the EE's had drawn it up.

Chris whistled, hummed, then carefully stepped around the portable stairs to the space behind. "Jen, can you help?"

"Ok." When she released the brake on the stairs, they rolled the stairs free and out away from the shelving units. "I'll look for the burn marks."

"Right." Chris turned back to the shelves. The blue lines overhead diverged; Chris toggled between drawings and actual live energy until he found the line. The real one, an open black snake of heavily insulated wire some five centimeters wide stretched from a conduit in the ceiling to a conduit that fed through the concrete bricks of the wall.

With only the insulated wiring hanging free between. Chris wanted to shake his head. Only, he knew how it had to have happened.

Repair the lines, some maintenance shift in the past had done. Well enough, just, to get the beast live again. The heavy black insulation of clean new wire shielded well enough. Flag the area, note it for maintenance to bring down on a night shift and run conduit to make everything fully secure.

Chris ran his fingers over the remains of yellow tape. The shelves concealed the hanging wires; the original crew had run the flagging just as they should have. Tied it off to the shelves.

Only, as Chris verified by walking out to the main aisle and taking a picture, the shelves concealed the wire and the flagging from anyone standing on the main walkway. If you didn't know to look... "When did Charlie come to the plant?"

Defu had the personnel authority to make that records request. "Eight years, Jian."

Chris nodded to himself.

****

Eight kilometers, and decades, stretched between the beast and the first cavern it had been used to construct. Chris kept his thoughts to himself as he and Defu made the drive.

Most of the plant's workers, the ones who'd been here more than five years especially, lived in that cavern. Defu and Jen were among those who made the drive every day. Chris tried to remember the last time he'd accompanied one of them, and couldn't do it.

Living in Shou, the beast, saved Chris a little extra money. He'd told himself, all those years ago, that this was the share of savings he'd use to buy himself a personal space, somewhere somewhen. The numbers had continued to grow in his bank account.

What hadn't grown to accompany the surplus, Chris admitted, was any real vision of what to spend the money on.

He'd asked Jen to make the presentation to the company's president. And then Defu had stepped in. "She wants you to do the presentation, Jian."

Chris had apologized to Jen for that, and meant it. For the missed opportunity to be present in front of those who made larger decisions.

Zhao Difei had been president of the operation for less than five years; Chris discounted the rumors that suggested she would move on in less than two additional years.

The typical president's tenure since Chris had come to Huoxing-Shou averaged something just more than nine years. He played the odds, such as they were. "Thank you for seeing us so quickly, ma'am."

Difei waved them both in; Defu and Chris both wore office clothing. They'd arrived early enough so that they'd been able to shower and change on entering the clean controlled space of the First Complex. "Not at all, Jian, Defu. None of us want such a loss. How, and what happens next, are most important."

Chris let Defu talk his way through the discovery of Charlie's body; then he explained what his and Jen's investigation had found.

"An accident, of course?" Difei asked when Chris wound his story down.

"Yes, ma'am." At least, everything Jen had found on the portable stairs said so. And with no loose ends, and Defu watching carefully, Chris had no suspicions to give voice to. Here and now.

Difei tapped her chin. "Jian. You'll be searching for how the wiring project went uncompleted. Send me the report as soon as you have it written."

"Absolutely," Chris agreed.

Difei rose, and Defu and Chris stood in response. "Thank you both for coming, and taking the time to give me a personal presentation. Please do keep me informed. My office is handling the funeral arrangements, so look for the email soon."

They were halfway to the elevators before Difei stuck her head out of the office to call Defu back.

"Go ahead, Jian," Defu told Chris. "You're staying at the Hilton? Do you want company for dinner?"

Chris smiled; Defu and his wife had adopted their grandchildren, twin boys about, what, twelve years old? "Go and enjoy the soccer game."

"Swimming," Defu replied. "Soccer begins next month."

Chris waved the other man away. "Go, go."

Chris was glad, when the elevator doors closed, that he wasn't the one who had to discuss whatever other business the president had remembered.

And, he admitted, that living in Shou meant that his rare stays at the Hilton were expenses Chris could charge to the company.

Chris didn't see the First Complex, and the Hilton, in any kind of separate perspective; the developers had filled the original salt cavern comprehensively. Everything here was a walk along enclosed hallways, most of them with video screens showing Earth views.

He preferred the view from Shou. Yes, the beast lived in piping and metal and clouds of dust under a red-tinged sky.

But it lived. The First Complex, and the other six living caverns, to Chris felt closer to a video game than anything else. No matter how well lit, and the sunlight really was replicated to great fidelity, Chris felt as though he walked perpetually down a fancy hospital's psychologically well-tuned atrium.

Jen rang Chris's tablet as he was sitting down to eat at the hotel restaurant. "How did it go?"

Chris stumbled through talking to Jen, reading the menu, and ordering iced tea. "Umm... right. Very short, really. She wants a report when we have one."

"Who to blame for the maintenance failure?"

Chris paused to remember Difei's face. Poised of course, closed. He didn't really know her, as other than a face on the other side of a screen, or the person behind an occasional email. Chris couldn't remember if he'd ever had more than a few personal words with the president.

Certainly not enough to judge where she was headed. "If I told you, I'd be lying. This is the first major accident since Difei took over."

"Meaning..."

Chris shrugged, paused to order the pork with long beans, then resumed his thinking. "Jen, there are some risks that are part of the job. If the company requires a scapegoat, though, you should know that you are not in line for the job." Yet, he didn't add.

She frowned, but accepted the quiet advice. "Ok. Do you need a ride back to the beast tomorrow morning?"

Chris weighed his options. In theory, Defu had obligated himself to give Chris a return ride.

On the other hand, riding to work with Jen meant Chris wouldn't have to discuss whatever it was that had caused Difei to call Defu back into her office. Discuss, or spend the minutes in silence not discussing. "What time do you leave?" Chris asked.

****

Part of the job lay in answering the phone whenever it rang. "Yes, ma'am?" Chris said, staring into his tiny bunk room's darkness.

"Jian, it's Difei."

He'd known from the phone's screen, but Chris didn't say that. "How can I help?"

"I read your report. It's a very good summary, I'd say. I just have a few questions."

Chris nodded, then said, "Please, go ahead."

He couldn't say, given how worn the insulation had been, that he'd been surprised when, on Jen's deep dive into the decades-old job logs for the beast, that she'd found that the electrical patch job had taken place on his predecessor's watch. Tommy Lu had held slightly different titles than Chris, but the job had been the same.

But Tommy had been good at the job. Good enough that Chris had immediately tasked Jen with going back through his own work logs. "If Tommy missed something like this, guaranteed Defu and I have a few little traps waiting. Different ones," Chris hoped. "But there will be something."

Though Chris had worried at a different aspect of the trail he'd found. Tommy wasn't just safely retired.

He was safely dead. Out of reach of blame. Difei had called to ask precisely that question. "How certain are you, Jian? You must know how convenient this might appear, should the need for blame, rather than simply..."

Fixing the issue. Yeah. Chris shivered a little. "We kept, and documented, the wire when we replaced and shielded it. The lot codes on the insulation match the original job and material logs. All of the documentation has been placed in archives with your office, and with the main operations center in Shenzhen."

"Where will you keep the wire?" The electronic documentation, and the pictures showing the lot codes on the wires, formed one database.

"We have a small warehouse on Shou devoted to project continuity." The boneyard, such as it was, formed the physical archive. Eighty years now of bits, pieces, most of it for equipment long since replaced and upgraded.

Chris didn't allow anyone to throw anything in that particular boneyard away, nor recycle it. Tommy'd taught him that, and he'd passed the lesson, he hoped, on to Jen. There was space enough. "I understand there is a similar storage area in First?" Chris asked.

"I don't think that will be necessary, Jian. You obviously put a great deal of care and effort into your job, I won't second guess you when there's no need to."

"Yes, ma'am."

"There is one other small matter. It's regarding Mr. Hai's wife and child."

Chris bolted up at that, then leaned over slightly. "Is there something wrong?"

"Would you mind talking to her? She will tell you. Jian, please do what you can for her. You know well, better than many, how much we all depend on each other here at Huoxing-Shou."

"Of course I'll do what I can."

"Thank you. You've handled all of this so well, I know this small denouement will be the last of Mr. Hai's worries for you."

Chris waited for Difei to hang up her end of the phone conversation, then set his phone down. Not to sleep, but to stare at the ceiling, and ponder the obligations she'd pressed down to him.

****

"Charlie wanted more than we needed, Mr. Wan."

"Chris, please, Yanli. What do you mean?" Chris had traveled back to First Complex to meet Charlie's widow and child.

He'd been shocked, and had to work to keep it from his face, when he'd found Charlie's apartments. Not only were they far larger than a couple and an eight-year old could normally use.

The apartments were in the high rent district.

In fact, Charlie and Yanli and little Teddy lived just below and a few doors down from Difei. Granted, the subsidized mortgage rates for Huoxing-Shou employees were more than affordable. But Yanli and Charlie had bought the place on the assumption of two incomes.

"I... Charlie's insurance won't pay off the entire mortgage." Yanli looked from Chris to Teddy, and left unspoken the rest of it.

That the company was supposed to take care of its own. In theory, Charlie's company insurance policy should have been enough to pay off an apartment, and then provide much of Teddy's college education. On Huoxing, sure, not back on Earth at the major universities.

But that assumption broke when the employee had reached for the clouds with his home. Chris wanted to argue, had to stop himself from asking whether "You tried to talk Charlie into something more sensible?"

His mind kept returning to the phone call from Difei, unrecorded on his end at least. But still very much placing him into an obligation. Or else the questions Difei had hinted at might not be carefully forgotten within Difei's office. "How much is left on the mortgage? And how much will Teddy's tuition be?" he asked.

And then he had to fight hard not to wince. Chris wanted more than anything at that point to convince Yanli to move someplace cheaper. But that would mean leaving First Complex, likely for Sixth, or perhaps so far as Seventh.

New schools, in other words. And the loss of networks and connections that went along with them. Chris rubbed his forehead, and told himself that living in Shou for the rest of his career wasn't as bad as all that. If he hadn't found anything else to spend the money on by this point... "I'll make sure it's taken care of, Yanli. And we'll set up a trust for Teddy's college."

One that, he hoped, could only be accessed for tuition and such. "Of course we'll set that up," Difei told him when Chris called to ask her if such a thing was possible. "I knew you would be able to handle this little problem."

****

Chris tried on his end to not mention what he'd done. But the beast's world was small. Word got around, as Chris knew it would.

"Why?" Jen asked.

Chris couldn't answer that fully. Though he did tell her of the implied threat; he had to. So that Jen would know what the signs were when her turn came.

"That doesn't explain all of it," Jen said. "You could have asked around. Defu, me, we'd have pitched in."

Jen maybe. Defu... "I'm happy to take on the obligation. That way, when you take over the job there's nothing hanging." And, if he made sure to be far enough away, he'd be able to leave Jen with room to maneuver. As Tommy had for Chris.

He probably left Jen with more questions unanswered than answered. But Chris thought that might be good.

The beast squatted in the middle of a great field of minerals, consuming them ton by ton to create galleries beneath the surface. Storms had covered the great metal monstrosity in red dust; a man in a just-as-dusty exposure suit crawled through the beast's gantries, inspecting, looking. Listening.

Chris-Jian Wan also spent his time on the beast's external workings thinking. Of how the beast worked. And the people that kept it going.

State of the writer circa... what week is it anyway?

State of the writer circa... what week is it anyway?

I lost time somewhere, these past couple weeks. Well, decoupled more than lost.

I've been thinking some about traction. When you have it, when you lose it.

A couple weeks back, I got one of those calls from my boss. The kind of call that ends with me getting a last minute plane ticket and a hotel room and heading a thousand miles away to the top of a mountain.

And staying here until we're done with what we have to do. Hazards of the day gig being essential, necessary. Sometimes, I get the call.

Which is why I found myself driving a beat up old one and a half ton, four wheeling it up the side of a mountain on a limestone gravel path. The trees and grass grow close up that track.

Close enough you can't see the fall. Which is kind of comfortable, really, when the wheels lose their grip. Put it in neutral, let her slide back down to the next easy slope, hunt for gear and 4 lo or hi until you think you've got it.

Throttle up and try it again, nope, ease back down, a little farther, back in 4 hi and let's use a little more gas, a little more velocity, don't think about how hard you've got the wheel over to the left and the way the tires are spinning.

A little rain, you see, can make yesterday's easy trip up today's quiet and focused trip up. Quiet in the cab of the truck, anyway. While it's happening.

Some other folks didn't have so quiet a trip, overloaded trailer making the same way and they tell me a different story depending on which one I ask. One of them says the rig lost its rear end, that's how the trailer ended up side over and jacknifed.

Another rumor says different, that they tried to hook on with another truck and tandem the load. Either way, no one got hurt, they just had the longest slow thirty seconds of their lives getting ready for the back wheels to catch...

Just. In the berm, and it's a funny business knowing they'd rather be over on their side, trailer ripped free of the gooseneck and the rig, rather than what would have happened if the wheels didn't catch. That slow ride would have gotten a lot faster, then. Thankfully it didn't.

Traction, when you have it and when you don't. Some ways, I've got traction these weeks. The day work, slow and painful, gets done. The milestones, the ones that tell us we're doing some good, and that tell me we're not going to get lucky we just have to stay good, they come.

Other ways, well, I'm thinking about the way Dean Wesley Smith puts it: set the goal, do the work, and even if you don't quite get the whole enchilada, what you did do is still one heck of a ways toward the ultimate goal.

What's that mean here? Well, if you dear reader have stuck with me for a while, you've seen the weekly story go up, and you've seen a monthly collection or novel go up to the broad retail release. I'll hit a year of the weekly stories mid-November, and I'll hit a year of the monthly January. I've got the work to make those marks, so that's...

I had a big moment, a couple weeks ago, looking at that result. The little light dawning, that hey, wow, I really did do the work.

And then I got that call I was talking about from the day gig. Don't worry, I've a story coming out Thursday, and I'll be able to carve out time to continue those on schedule. And with the monthly releases, well, we'll just have to stack 'em up a couple in November, or maybe even triple in December.

You takes your little victories, and you gets on down the road. Sure, I can wish I had the time, and oh lordy most of all the energy, to get myself a few more words every day than I've been able to get the past month plus.

I count stories in the directories, you see, because I had one of my occasional dark days, the ones where the energy levels read "forget it" and the failure klaxons ring in my ears.

Rough seas, and I know how good it feels to write. I know this is temporary. I know this.

But I still have the waves and the clouds and the call to get through, and they pass and I come out into clear water again, and I tell myself, hey, you've done good work here, breathe deep. Don't think. Just be.

Put it in neutral. Watch the mirrors, easy on the brake. Trust it. The ride. The work. The process. Find a little spot.

Put it back in gear and ease on the throttle again. When you're ready. It's still there, the road. Ready to meet you when you're ready to go where it leads. Breathe. You're good. You did well.

There's a mountain there. Ahead. Wanna go see what the view looks like from there?

I do.

Thursday's Child Would Like A Word With Management - A Tale Of Workaday Witchery by M. K. Dreysen

This week's story is one more Tale Of Workaday Witchery; after this, I'm out of them for the moment. They came to me in a three-day rush in May.

I had to re-write the Friday story from scratch. Jesus saves, children, and so should you.

Ok, behind-the-scenes moments aside...

The lost come to us on the wind. Voices of desparation. Of terror.

They look for hope. For a place to run to. A quiet spot in the road, really, from there to wherever.

Morgan hears such a lost voice in this week's free story, dear reader. I wonder who needs a little respite and a bit of a hand up?

This one I call...

Thursday's Child Would Like A Word With Management - A Tale Of Workaday Witchery by M. K. Dreysen

The voices should not come in so strong of a workday.

It said so right here on the tin. The one Morgan kept on her desk. One of the actual antique coffee tins, as opposed to the dimestore remakes Maxwell House and Folgers had started putting out to cash in on the nostalgia train. Morgan's tin collected post-its, pennies and nickels through the slot in the top.

Wishes and curses from the ether while Morgan put in the butt in chair time. Such was the tin's purpose. Repository for requests for help. Pause button.

This one bypassed the wish catcher. No screams. Or burning pain. Only "Please," and the salt of a tear.

Morgan's daylight job did have perks. Precious little monotony, that was a big one. Work from home, nice. No particular schedule, glorious. The constant work cell companion had its moments, but all in all Morgan very much enjoyed the way life had worked out. Except for moments like this.

When the twilight job drifted out of the tin. She gave it a good hard look. "What happened, you on vacation?"

The red can ignored her. Huffily. Which it could do. The last time this happened had been because the tin was stuffed way past capacity. So, that time was her own fault, really.

Morgan teased the can's lid open, expecting a flood of plaintive. Only, that didn't happen. No wash of regrets, of hopes tied to lost dreams.

In fact, the can was empty. "You're not exactly soothing my mind here," Morgan told the can.

Which ignored her. The can's job was to hold the requests. Anything outside the slot, and Morgan could figure it out herself. Who's the witch here, anyway, the can didn't ask.

She drummed her fingers on the can. Then on the desk. When neither of these sufficed, Morgan sighed. "Maybe this is just the universe telling me I need to get up and walk around?"

The request came around again. No tear this time. Just, "Please." A child, maybe? Teenager?

Under normal conditions, a request caught in the tin could be traced. Well, more easily traced, anyway. Morgan had had more than one reason on her mind when she'd put the charm together. Wishes, in her experience, didn't come with well defined backtrails.

There were far too many for that. Playoffs gave Morgan headaches. And the one time she'd visited Vegas, she'd spent the night on her hotel room floor, in tears, carpet fuzz ripped from the pile and threading her fingernails.

Humans generate wishes the way a dolphin blows bubbles, in Morgan's experience. Thus, the tin.

Still. She had the old ways.

Any city would have been a vast, echoing storm in Morgan's head. Distance matters naught, not to hopes and dreams. So when the tiny little brass cross (she'd guessed correctly), faint green tracing the knotwork she'd always been too fearful of polishing, rotated south, and not north into Houston, Morgan sighed in relief.

Not downtown, not east or west or southwest, but true south. Which, sure, if she got to Galveston and the cross still wanted her to keep going...

She didn't go so far. Just to Friendswood. Or, almost.

First time she'd passed the skate rink, Morgan had ignored it. Kind of like the bowling alley a few miles north of it, the skating rink couldn't have still been there.

The rink and the alley had, of course, ignored Morgan's ideas of anachronism entirely. As they should have, she admitted. One thing she enjoyed about her job, the twilight one, and that was the way the spirits went about their lives. Adapted, fed on, endured the humans that dreamt and then forgot them. Mostly.

The child, and yeah, he was a teenager, had been drawn to the rink by something he didn't want to admit to. Not to Morgan, anyway.

The rink shared its parking lot with another little shopping center; probably the same owner, Morgan figured. Given the way both buildings fought the battle with age and minimal updates.

A canal bound the back side of both buildings. A cooperative canal, between Pearland and Friendswood; the skate rink sat on the one side of the boundary, the little shopping center just to the south on the other.

The towns had split the costs of upgrading the flood canal, expanding and restructuring it, after the last hurricane. Which had reminded every one of the area's residents that there would be another.

The rink whispered to Morgan. Of relief. That the subdivision on the other side of the canal could go no farther. No canal, and the developer would just have bought out the rink's owner.

She parked in front. Still well before lunch time, well before any self-respecting teenage wheeliac would come anywhere near the rink, so Morgan had her choice. The car would broadcast meanings, though.

September. Still hot enough to bite and press when Morgan stepped out.

The whisper repeated. "Please." Morgan looked to her dashboard; the cross, just a brass form with no figure bound to its face, lay there on its back. Balanced on the head of a needle pressed into the dashboard's foam. The cross pointed to the trees that bound the canal.

"Ok," Morgan whispered. "Where are you, kid?"

She didn't send a charm. Not if she didn't need to. Like with the car, she didn't want to spook the kid. That the kid's plea had bypassed her catcher told Morgan she should be patient.

And, a little wary. Which, it turned out, was a good thing.

This one was a planner.

"I haven't seen a suitcase like that one in years," Morgan said through the willows.

The kid sat in the middle of the copse; the towns had encouraged the trees, one of those rare times when the wildlife receive, if not a say, at least a passing acknowledgement. Morgan saw it, the kid's realization she was coming his way: his shoulders twisted, bunched.

Like he'd prepared himself for the yelling, and now the time had come to brace himself. "I've had it since I was a baby," he told her.

A blue pasteboard case, brass locks, the suitcase was barely outside the carry-on limit. Morgan sensed books in it. Smelled the dust and the binding of favorites well worn. Maybe a change of clothes, jeans and t-shirts carrying a similar feeling as the books.

Comfort.

She waited until he felt like talking about it. Worked through... fear, that one, the big one. "He doesn't beat me," the young man started.

Morgan acknowledged the truth of his statement. So far as it went. "But..."

He drew. Played trumpet. Listened to Mozart, preferred Liszt.

He wanted to be an engineer.

"Mechanical?" "Electrical. Mostly. Circuits, micro-machines."

She nodded, waited a little more. This one didn't quite fit, yet. So she just had to be patient.

He played with the handle on the suitcase. In his mind, Morgan viewed pieces, memories of the day a week and a bit ago when he'd packed the case and walked out of the door. Three in the afternoon, when they were both still at work. "He says, if I was as smart as I thought I was, I'd go to business school. 'Hell, even law school. At least that way you'd make some real fucking money.'"

"Wants you to move and shake?"

"'We fuck engineers for breakfast. Steal their shitty ideas and sell them before anyone knows whether they work or not.'" The kid shrugged. "I put Purdue, A&M, on my test forms."

The list of five; the memory of it flashed through the kid's head, and Morgan's. The way his stomach turned, filling out the computer's request: Which schools do you want us to send your results to? Forcing himself to make the butterflies go away, deep breath deep breath, because he kept having to go back and correct his answers until the nerves finally quit screaming.

The kid had filled his list with engineering schools. The list was private, he'd told himself. He won't ever find out.

Except the kid didn't anticipate the number of flyers. The box full of the damned things; A&M started mailing them in December. By March, the maroon-decorated envelopes came three times a week.

Sometimes five. The kid's father loomed in his mind, again. "I didn't raise a goddamned Aggie. I'm gonna have me a motherfucking bonfire in the front yard with all that maroon shitkicker puke."

And, of course, he had. A week and three days back. The kid remembered more than anything old man Brannegan, three doors down, passing by in his ancient Volvo and shaking his head.

The kid had sent the acceptance letter just that same morning. Through the school counselor's office; Mrs. Lopes wasn't exactly sure what was going on, but she'd happily conspired anyway.

As best Morgan could tell, the kid had made it about twelve, fifteen miles. If the compass in his head was accurate.

The acceptance letter had been for a full ride.

Morgan had listened to the plea. Downstairs to the fridge, bottle of water and a note for the better half, in case Fayela got home before she did. "Please," whispered in her head, in the car. Now.

He just needed a few weeks. And maybe a ride to Bryan-College Station.

****

Morgan had vowed to herself, years ago, "No more strays."

Which lasted about a week. When Trelasia Princess Tux, Mistress Mousecatcher and Chief Desk Nuisance, had shown up in the backyard, and remained yet as the Only Home's most important cat.

Most other strays they managed to get to the adoption centers, or the shelters in case of the human lost, before anyone had the chance to impress the couch cushions. Fayela loved Morgan's ethic, but she'd also posted her limits. "Two cats, two little dogs, and no more."

Which Morgan had, mostly, stuck to. The kid didn't come into the list; he wouldn't be taking up the spare room.

Well. Sort of.

Ten years in residence and there could be precious few nooks and crannies Fayela didn't know of. The door to the attic certainly did not qualify.

Normally. Morgan talked to the house. No flattery. No false promises of new caulk, new paint. Morgan knew her limits, and those of the bank accounts.

She had to promise a new flower bed. Tulips in February and maybe a chrysanthemum. No more roses, the house declared.

They both of them knew that might be pushing it. But the house accepted her promise, and expanded just a little in return. "It's basically a dorm room," she told the kid.

"Warren," he said. "Warren..."

"Stop there."

"Oh," he continued. "Um." He looked around the attic room that hadn't existed before. "Good thing I'm kind of short."

Morgan swallowed a chuckle. "I know it's a bit like you're spending the summer in jail." Or one of those summer camps. The kind A&M would be hosting in late July. So he wouldn't have to stay in confinement all that long. "I've got a laptop you can use. And my library."

Warren smiled. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Fayela did find out. Teenagers having the appetites they do, the extra pizza gave Morgan and Warren away. "You could have just asked. I'm not a complete monster."

Morgan tried to head that off before the argument could really get rolling. "This way, he's not actually in the house."

Fayela smirked, pointed at the second cardboard Mario's box sitting on the kitchen counter. "Really?"

Morgan attempted, badly, to not laugh. The half-contained snort hurt when it passed through her nose and threatened to peel her eyelids. "Ok, you got me."

"Engineers..." Fayela muttered.

"Hey, now."

"Did you finish that new unit drawing?" Fayela asked.

"Oh, Christ." Morgan ran back up to her monk's cell.

"I'm keeping track!" Fayela yelled up the stairs. "That's three Friday's since January you owe me!"

The lady on the tin can hid her smile behind her hand. "Now don't you start," Morgan muttered.

Humpday Blues - A Tale Of Workaday Witchery by M. K. Dreysen

Part of the job is saying no, right?

No to the screwy ideas someone really should have spent a little more time with. No, no, and then really, oh hell no.

Part of the job. Watching out for the company.

Looking out for the folks who do the real work. They're the ones who'll have to handle the shit.

Yep. Gotta learn to say no.

Gotta learn to make it stick. And now that's the kicker, right? Not enough to spot the nasty little ideas, the ones that sneak in on honeyed words and slick sales pitches. It's not enough to just say no.

You have to make it stick. Ula works that particular job at her company. The one where she's on the lookout, protecting the people up and down the ladder from the way it always rolls downhill.

In this week's free story, dear reader, let's you and me find out just how Ula makes the No stick.

Humpday Blues - A Tale of Workaday Witchery by M. K. Dreysen

A day's work shouldn't have been so screwy. That's how Ula saw it, anyway. Up and noisy, some days are just like that. Quiet, nothing doing, that too. She could deal with either one.

Days that made roller coasters seem tame, on the other hand... Ula wanted nothing more than to toss those days right in the trash can.

"You're a woman who knows how to make me appreciate my own madness," Morgan said. At her end of the phone call, Morgan stared at the ceiling. She'd had her own start to the day, and here it was only getting on lunchtime.

Ula didn't call just to vent, though. She saved that for happy hour, or the weekend. When the chances anyone in the office would overhear disappeared in the rearview mirror. "You ever have that conversation, the one where everybody else in the room wants you to do something you know will turn to shit?"

Morgan rubbed the bridge of her nose. "I get the feeling someone's not going to appreciate the way this conversation ends."

"Not if I do my job."

Morgan smiled. She enjoyed listening to Ula's office stories; listening, not being involved in them. Ula did have a tendency to calculate her blast radius only after the fact. "Do I need to catch a plane to another jurisdiction?"

"Not today. Though you might want to keep the idea ready to go, in case you need to buy a second ticket."

Morgan had tried to arrange her day gig so that it didn't hang over the real work. But then, she hadn't been at the same company for going on thirty years, the way Ula had. Rub the elbows long enough, and the little violations eventually followed you home every night.

When the office turns into a family, the drama rides for free.

Ula couldn't bin the request. Not with the head of sales, his most valuable player, and the prospect on the make sitting on the other side of the table. "They're hiding something," she told her boss after the meeting.

The meeting he hadn't been invited to. "Of course they are. That's why I didn't make their list." Head of ops, anything the bright lights came up with, Geoff would be in charge of implementing the idea. Assuming Geoff could be convinced to do it.

Which put Ula in the seat where the heat met the fanny. "So why'd they come to me first?"

Geoff chuckled. "What I want to know is, can and should we do what they want?"

Ula shelved the can question, the easy one.

The should lingered. The rest of the day, and all of the night. While she queried Google, and a few other databases. For Martain Limited, and the connections.

"What set the warning bells off?" Morgan asked, later.

"He was too good to be true. Former research scientist for BASF, and now he's working ideas of his own." Which, that much Ula could appreciate. She'd been on the receiving end of those calls, on occasion. The ones where commas and digits grew beyond the dreams of avarice.

Someone behind Robert Martain, consultant, wanted Ula, Geoff, and most of all their little operation, to take some liability off their hands.

She traced the chemical through its warnings. The labs in Italy that found mice, then rhesus monkeys, with just that extra little bit of elevated melanoma risk. The EPA and NIH trial studies.

Those initial steps spoke of twenty, maybe thirty years before the world got their shit together and banned Martain's little baby molecule. The one he'd tried to march through the ranks at BASF, until someone there had sniffed the data Martain had done his best to hide away.

The competitors weren't so reticent, it seemed. One of them, at least. Except Martain's new backers understood the downside train they'd find themselves hitched to, if they didn't cover their tracks.

Ula, among other jobs, babysat specialty blending operations. Vitamins, medications, trace minerals supplements, she and Geoff and their little crew walked the tightrope between fad and necessity. Where food and medicine and the anxieties of a planet all met.

Martain had developed his special molecule as an immune system booster. He'd spent a few years watching, reading, as the gene therapy gurus pressed their own rock up the mountain.

He'd caught an idea and ran with it. To the point where greed and ignorance, Ula found, drew down and fought in the dirt.

The sales force should have grown accustomed to the slicks. Ula had worked her ass off over the past thirty years training them to spot the warning signs. Martain slipped past the barriers because of his backers. Ula didn't bother with pointing out those backers were happy to throw front money at Trinity Blendings, just so long as Trinity signed the contracts.

The ones that assigned property rights and liabilities.

Ula had learned the hard way: when the buffalo lined up to run, she got the hell out of the way. Until the dust settled.

But then... Ula read a little further. Martain's first go 'round, he'd gone looking for that evergreen, a young professor with tenure hopes slipping into the red zone. Down in the bowels of that paper, buried in an appendix, Ula found solubility reports on Martain's molecule.

Residence times. The kind of results that cold war scientists had looked for when they wanted to develop long-acting nerve agents, the type that clung to the underside of leaves, seeped into soil.

Lingered. For generations.

Turned former manufacturing facilities into Superfund sites.

Every coin has two sides; Ula's rituals needed such symmetry. For every keystroke, a gesture over a cup of coffee.

A point, click, drag, drop, and yes to the permanent delete. Reflected by a couple dozen of Ula's cookies, oatmeal, chocolate chip, macadamia nut. "No, my grandmother would rise from the grave to disown me if I gave out the secret," she said.

Memory lingers, in computers. In the human mind. She'd liked to have said, "Oh forget their number." She'd done so in the past, and made it stick.

Too many people this time for that. So Ula deleted files, and laid the bonds of ritual across her colleagues, in the same breath. The ritual whispered, "Forget." Her computer commands did the same.

Contact information drifted into the ether, bit by bit. From phones last, because of course they didn't get plugged into the computer every week like company policy recommended. But time moved, and Ula's scripts stayed the course.

Just as the questions disappeared. Ula's suggestion, carried on sugar and coffee and the spirit of conversations lingering, nudged Martian Limited to the back burner. And then, to the "Who? Oh, right," stage.

And then, on the day Ula called Morgan and asked her to meet at the original Ninfa's for happy hour, Martain Limited, the memory of them at Trinity Blendings, anyway, was gone. Banished.

"How'd you determine they've been exorcised?" Morgan asked. Happy hour had evolved, a little. Instead of a pitcher of frozen, Morgan stirred a margarita on the rocks.

The kind the bartender still had to make by hand, rather than the by-the-bucket pre-mix.

Ula sipped from a Two Bats Dark, the mug so cold the August air frosted the sides. "I convinced I.T. to open the spam folder for me. The one that holds the stuff they flag before it even gets to us."

"And?"

"Every email Martain or his colleagues have sent for the last six weeks has gone straight to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky."

"And the phone calls?"

Ula smiled. "Same business. The company put in a spam monitor on our cell phones, back in May. Blocks all suspicious calls. Seems the company president got tired of three in the morning robocalls."

Morgan congratulated her friend; happy hour proceeded quietly, the pair concentrating on good company and the lingering heat of an August evening in Houston.

Morgan knew the threat would come again. Under a new guise, perhaps, a new name. Ula would need new rituals, would cast new protections, and cast out new threats. It all went with the territory.

Weekend Projects

Once Hurricane Delta passed us by, that meant I had a weekend of projects to finish.

It began with telling half of the feline contingent how I felt about brushing out all of his fur. He's shedding ahead of the winter coat. And as you can tell, he's not exactly ready to admit anything regarding the pile of loose fur I've just swept up...

His Orangeness wasn't done, of course. Here he is performing the role of safety inspector. (Note: if you don't know what any of these items are, other than the cat, please call an electrician if an outlet is acting up. If you're nervous about working with electricity, that's a good thing!)

Finished with the outlet replacement, I then moved on to installing a set of drawers. We've been making do with shelves on a set of kitchen roller units for... gosh it's been 20 years and five different apartments/houses, more or less. Anyway, we got tired of fighting the soda storage, so I'm putting in a set of drawers to make life easier.

The drawer rails needed a little modification; I don't have a drill press handy, so here's my solution for this particular case. (Note: yes, use the safety gear. We won't talk about the fact that I'm now wearing tri-focal prescription safety glasses will we? I will insist that you take my word for this, though: metal shavings in your eye are no fun. Trust me. Thus, my safety glasses. Gloves too, because yeah I know what metal splinters feel like, as well. You don't see the ear plugs because your humble photographer was wearing them...)

Having seen that one of the cats had stuck his nose into the business, the canine contingent showed up to help. Of course, they're more interested in what's going on at the front door...

Here's the drawer rails right after installation, but before the drawers themselves go in.

And then here's the finished setup.

And of course, my feline inspector once again needs to put his stamp of approval on the proceedings. I told him I measured it all square and everything before I bolted it down, but of course he's not satisfied with that.

Last project of the day: dinner. Our daughter is in a culinary class; we're out of carrots due her needing to practice dicing this week, so the part of carrots and mirepoix for our Mulligan Stew was instead played by bell peppers and the Trinity.

Take The Flyer by M. K. Dreysen

Moishe gets lost. And by gets lost, I mean the child really gets lost. Can't find his way back from a strange building lost. Friends and family don't let him drive lost.

The kid's got no sense of direction. At all. Only, in one rare instance, as it turns out, there are places only Moishe can find.

Oh. And creatures. But be patient. We'll get to them. Or perhaps they'll come for us...

This week's free story, dear reader, is called Take The Flyer.

Take The Flyer by M. K. Dreysen

Moishe passed the flyer half a dozen times before he pulled it off the bulletin board.

The one outside the department's office. Someone had tucked the flyer in next to the "Roommate Wanted". The flyer read, "You really can make money from your dorm room, honest!"

"Must be a psych department study," Gracie said when Moishe showed her the paper. "You ready to be a guinea pig, Moishe?"

Moishe recalled his bank account. And the start of semester's bookstore panic, wondering if he'd bounced another check. "Wanna earn fifty bucks the easy way?" he replied.

"The hard way," Gracie corrected.

"What?"

"The joke's 'Wanna earn fifty bucks the...'." Gracie stopped as Moishe's cluelessness spread across his face. "Oh, look never mind that. You'll be number ten for a nine person study, you know that, right?"

Right, Moishe told himself. "Which is why I pulled the flyer off the board, Gracie."

"At least you admit it."

"I'm headed over there right after lab. I'll put it back on the board if they're still looking for people, promise."

Gracie rolled her eyes. "Let's just get to the fumes and the goo."

Six hours later and Moishe's memory of the flyer had vanished under the monotony of organic chemistry. He stumbled up the stairs and out into something that he did recall. Vaguely: clean air. As much as there could be downwind of the fume hood exhaust. At least he could see through the clear fall evening. Once he remembered to take his goggles off and put his glasses back on.

"Ahem," Gracie said. "Moishe..."

"What?"

"The flyer? The one you're relieving our fellow chemists of the burden of reading? And, just possibly, benefiting from?"

Moishe's hand slapped at the back pocket of his jeans. Where all receipts and notes went to die. Or to be lost irretrievably the next time he sat for a lecture.

Six hours standing in front of a distillation column that refused his entreaties had saved the flyer from disappearance to the lecture hall floor. "Guess I'll head over and see what they have to say. Huh."

"What?"

"Office CB-009, where's that?"

"No clue. The psych building's prefix is Y, are you sure?" Gracie reached for the flyer.

Moishe let her have it; better than arguing with her. And, maybe he had read it wrong. Too many hours behind goggles and his eyes still weren't ready to cooperate.

"Huh," Gracie muttered.

Moishe pushed his glasses up on his forehead, then his cell phone close enough to his nose so that he could read the campus map. "Told you. It's not the psych department. It's somewhere in the biology building." He thought. The map's key had been built to the same standard as the university's semester class schedule notation.

"Biology's prefix is BI," Gracie pointed out. Almost, Moishe thought, a little indignantly.

Then again, she was carrying that Bio minor. Three semesters in, Moishe figured he knew Gracie well enough to assign a little meaning to her reaction. Moishe was a little lost lamb, his paths limited to the library, the dorms, chemistry, physics, math. No more history and English, philosophy, AP tests and their freshman year had taken care of that end of things.

Gracie, on the other hand, piloted a more general course. To bizarre, far-off lands such as biology and psychology. Moishe had come to suspect that, chem major aside, Gracie harbored the dream of medical school.

Either way, Moishe knew, because she'd told him so, that Gracie believed Moishe couldn't be trusted on his own when it came to exploring new things and strange places. "I should go with you," she said. "Make sure you find it."

"Gracie," Moishe began.

Her phone buzzed. "Shit, hang on," Gracie told him. "Yeah?"

She walked far enough away so Moishe could pretend he didn't hear Gracie's conversation with her roommate. Moishe hid his relief, he hoped, when Gracie hung up. "I guess you're on your own for this one," she said.

It being Gracie's turn to stop at the campus pizza parlor and bring a large cheese and mushroom back to her dorm.

"Raid night?" Moishe asked. Gracie's roommate, a political science major named Tarisse, allowed herself a handful of study breaks every week. With pre-determined start and end times. And invite lists.

Moishe had yet to make the cut. Not that he cared, really. Especially not after Gracie had pointed out Tarisse's very studied curation of her social set, and the obvious, once someone else clued him in, "Network Building" behind it.

"Just... Moishe. Don't get lost on your way home again, ok?"

"Jeez, Gracie, that was last year! I take one wrong turn, am I gonna hear about it until graduation?"

Moishe turned to go.

"Ah, Moishe?"

"What?"

"Biology building's that way," Gracie pointed out.

"Ah? Shit." Moishe turned himself around, north instead of south, and grumbled his way over to the biology building's basement. The one he had never known existed.

His phone buzzed just as he reached the biology building. "Text me when you get back home."

Moishe tucked the phone, and Gracie's message, back into his pocket. The map said this was the building, and that the office should be somewhere downstairs. But he'd fallen for that before. Spring semester, Moishe had taken a music class, history or appreciation he forgot which. The map had told him to go to the fifth floor of the music building.

Only, the music building Moishe went into only had three floors. The map did admit the companion building, across the plaza, existed. It just insisted that building was where the art department lived, not the music department.

This time, the map did believe that the biology building contained a basement. A tiny one, the map showed maybe half a dozen cubbyholes. And a stairway. Which should be behind the door Moishe stood in front of.

Moishe paused, caught between the feeling that he was about to get run over by someone on their way to evening lecture, and the belief that he probably should just give this up and go read a book instead.

People streamed in and out of the main doors. But the little door to the basement stairs, and Moishe and his indecision, lay tucked to the side, and below, the concrete porch of the main doors. Moishe had plenty of time and space to argue with himself.

And then go looking for room CB-008.

****

"It's some kind of animal study," Moishe texted Gracie later that night.

"Did you get lost?" she responded. "And what kind of animal study?!?! You're allergic to cats!"

"And dogs and everything else. And no, I didn't get lost."

Not really. The chemistry building was right there across the way; once he'd finished the interview, sure, he'd had to take a few minutes, under street lamps because he'd been with the lady taking the study applications longer than he thought.

Moishe wondered at that. Labs ended at six, he'd only been down there with Miss, or was it Professor? Miss Martinez? Ok, Doctor Martinez at least. Anyway, he'd only been down there long enough to fill out the little card she'd given him, dorm room address, name, major, phone number and email. Answer her questions, yes he did have a computer. No, he didn't have a social media account.

"That's the one," Doctor Martinez had said. "We have to turn down anyone who does."

"What do you have to do?" Gracie asked.

"Just watch video and post pictures," Moishe answered. "Twice a week for six weeks, six hundred bucks."

"Sweet gig, any room for me????"

"Nope." By the standards of their peers, Gracie's social media feed might as well have been as non-existent as Moishe's. But she did have one.

"Too bad. Ok, gotta run, Tari's calling us back from snack break. See ya! tomorrow!"

Moishe fell asleep while reminding himself to put the flyer back on the chemistry department bulletin board.

****

Doctor Martinez wasn't a professor. "Not yet, anyway. I'm a research assistant. With a little luck, this project will be the one that gets me a tenure-track job."

Moishe nodded. "Ok. So what exactly am I supposed to do?"

Martinez had phoned Moishe two days after the interview. About the time he'd started telling himself that nothing would come of it, and he'd better start applying to Whataburger. "Can you take a walk around campus with me?" she'd asked.

She wanted to show him the cameras at the heart of the study. "We've got disk space enough for seventy-two hours of video. So you'll be able to go home for the weekend, if you want."

Once Martinez pointed them out, Moishe learned to spot the cameras. Tucked into oak trees and the lights illuminating the campus flower beds. On the sills of strategically chosen windows. "On the roof, too," Martinez said. "Pigeons, mostly, but we get a few falcons as well. Especially on the taller buildings."

"Do I need to do anything with the cameras?" he asked. "Because I'm not sure I could find any of these again, without you here to help."

Martinez shook her head. "Nope. That's my job, and Rickie Walker's. She's one of Professor Litsmoth's graduate students, you'll meet her. Your job's to watch the video and sort the interesting bits."

Rickie gave him more of the explanation when she gave Moishe his login information. "You're our control."

"Against?"

"AI. Mona built a system to catalog animal behavior automatically. But she has to calibrate it."

"Which is where I come in."

And hour after hour of students passing by cameras. "During daylight hours, the cameras roll full time," Rickie told him. "After sundown, they're activated by motion sensors."

Moishe ran the videos as fast as he dared. "You'll get faster as you learn," Martinez said. And he did that, too. Twice regular speed the first few days, then up to four times by the end of the week.

The squirrels dominated the action during the day. Every camera with an angle picked up the little thieves and their antics. And the students that fed them both.

"Thing is," Rickie said. "The squirrels get the most attention."

Moishe's hour of video review each day went like this. Fast forward until squirrel, flag the timestamp, then fast-forward again until the next bit. Add a few notes, like "Students feeding squirrels at the fountain" to each timestamp in the list. Then, when he reached the end of the day's backlog, email his list to Rickie.

But that wasn't the end of it. Moishe's final job each day was to go back to one or two of his timestamps, cut out a minute or two of the action, then post the video clips to the study's Twitter account.

"Publicity," Martinez told Moishe when he asked. "For the university and the study."

And thus, Moishe realized, eventually, why Martinez and Walker wanted someone without a social media presence.

Moishe's first few squirrel videos, because Rickie was right as rain, squirrels dominated the action for both the cameras and the Twitter feed, Moishe obsessively read all the comments.

That stopped when he counted the number of shitheads trolling the feed. "You block those, right?"

Rickie nodded. "Yep, the never ending battle. Just post the videos you like, I'll take care of the assholes."

So Moishe focused on the job that Martinez was actually paying him for. Spotting what animals got up to amongst the noise of forty thousand students and faculty roaming campus.

The pigeons showed, of course. Sparrows and finches, too; Moishe didn't know enough about the little birds to really distinguish their proper names. A kestrel and her mate roamed the place. She posted herself most often on the psych department's back door porch. Away from the foot traffic, Moishe figured, and in hunting view of one of the last patches of open grass still remaining to the campus.

At night, though, the owls dominated Moishe's attention. They came late, after the night classes released and only the die-hards remained. That's when the silent killers moved in. Barn owls mostly. Moishe looked those up once he'd caught the little assassins ghosting the cameras lining the walk to the music building.

He remembered that shady walk from his music class. Well, he believed it was the same walk. It turned out the architecture building shared a similar green alley, laid out with street lamps and live oaks.

Moishe did find a way to distinguish between the two. After midnight, a single owl haunted the architecture walk. No barn owl, when Moishe spotted her he went straight to the internet. She, it seemed, was a barred owl. The stripes decorating her eyes gave her away. She liked to take her mice and the occasional squirrel into a live oak, usually around two in the morning.

Her favorite perch for the evening repast sat just in front of one of Martinez's cameras.

The barn owls happily displayed their hunting prowess. Half a dozen of the smaller species roamed the music department's walk; at least once a night Moishe found one of them posing, wings up, crouched, waiting for the right moment to pounce.

The barred owl gave him no such view. Only the site of her gulping her way through dinner. Moishe posted the barn owls on their hunts, but left their larger cousin's views for himself and the study. Hoping that eventually she'd grace the cameras with something more.

The squirrels took all the online attention through the first half of Moishe's six weeks. A possum mother and her brood clinging to her back waddled their way into second place. The kestrel danced through the morning thermals and into third place.

Moishe's owls, his favorites, came dead last. "I don't get it."

"No worries," Rickie answered. "They're golden for the study itself. And the squirrels bring in the traffic regardless. So it's a win-win, Moishe. Really, just post them and get on with your life."

Moishe tried his best to do that. But little things, like the fact that the campus stray dog population outranked his owls, and the cats wandering the place seriously looked like they were ready to climb all the way up and challenge the squirrels...

"Moishe, when does your study end?" Gracie asked him one day at lunch.

"Um." He looked at his calendar. "Three more weeks." Had it really been only three weeks? Moishe felt like he'd lost a month somewhere. "Why?"

"Ever listen to your grandmother go on about her soaps?"

Moishe blushed, then dropped his end of the conversation.

****

Moishe's biology knowledge didn't extend much farther than NOVA and Nature and his sophomore year in high school. Three weeks into the study, though, he'd built himself a little citadel of new information.

Raccoons and possums. Stray dogs and cats. Birds aplenty; squirrels that turned bread, french fries, and potato chips into protein for much of the rest of the population.

"A couple hundred acres of trees and grass in the middle of a city," Moishe told himself. The green spaces built the common threads between his video companions.

The deer startled him when they made their appearance. A buck, showing off his fall semester head gear, and two, sometimes three does that he accompanied. The does wandered into frame just an hour before dawn on the third weekend of Moishe's study participation. The one right after Gracie had reminded Moishe that he'd become a little obsessive.

"Do I get some kind of grade?" Moishe had asked Doctor Martinez.

"No. Hell, Moishe, I won't even know which of you and your compatriots picked out which videos. They're anonymized so we don't accidentally bias our results."

The little herd startled Moishe so much that he didn't note their first appearance on camera. He didn't try yet to figure out which camera they'd shown up on. He just watched, breathless and waiting for something he didn't understand, as the does made their way across the camera's frame.

For the study, that weekend's haul turned out to be a confrontation between a momma cat and a squirrel who'd eaten so many student handouts Rickie had nicknamed him Andre the Giant; the possum gang, now so large their mother refused them rides, parsing the leavings after a raccoon raided the library's trash cans; and two male barn owls tussling in view of a female.

Moishe, on the other hand, remembered only the deer. He told himself, that week, while he waited every night for another sighting, that he'd got caught up because of boredom. The deer stood out because they were something different. Moishe pulled a satellite image of the campus, then traced his finger across the bayou drifting along just a couple blocks south.

The weekday traffic seemed too much for the deer herd to brave; the next weekend, though, and sure enough, Sunday morning in the wee hours, when Moishe pulled the camera feeds live to his dorm room, he found the buck looking straight into the camera.

The buck shook his head, pawed at the ground. The cameras didn't have microphones; still, Moishe could hear the buck snorting at him. "Do you know I'm here?" he asked the animal.

In response, the buck flared his nostrils, reared up, and charged, just a step or two toward the camera. Behind him, the does startled, ears up and tails waving. The buck false-charged again, ducking his head and his weapons to Moishe.

And then the deer bounded away. Their tails waved at him as they disappeared into the brush.

"Woa." Moishe backed away from his monitor; he wanted to jump up and pace. He remembered the roommate agreement before he could get too far with that. So he picked up his laptop and a jacket and made his way out of the room before he accidentally woke Chris.

Gracie was out, and for a similar reason to Moishe's roommate. The Honors College had hosted one of their occasional parties the night before. Midterms fell on them all next week; Professor Staul liked the timing. Chris had gone, and so had Gracie.

Moishe had stayed in his room. Even with only a couple hours' nap, the deer keyed him up too much to go back to sleep. So Moishe found his way to the edge of the kestrel's hunting territory, set himself down with his laptop, and went looking for the camera that had captured the deer herd's passage.

Which turned out to be a lot harder to do than Moishe expected. "Shit," he muttered to himself, once he realized what was going on.

Rickie had anonymized the camera feeds. Each night, Moishe received the links to the feeds; strings of random letters and numbers. Moishe went back and read through all of his emails. But there were no correlations. The same camera that captured the barred owl most nights came to him with labels like "A8tOOl" one night, and "trO9311z" the next.

"She just doesn't want the internet figuring out the camera sequence," he told himself. And stumbling around looking for Andre the Giant or his friends and neighbors.

Of course, the majority of students and faculty could figure out which cameras overlooked particular pieces of property. Even Moishe had managed that much.

The deer, though, had found a camera he couldn't track down. Certainly not from his own poor brain's images; even Google's streetview and satellite imagery didn't help. In Moishe's memory, the deer stood in front of trees and brush, in an open stretch of grass that looked like it hadn't been touched with a mower since summer break.

With no buildings in the background, no street signs, nothing that Moishe might have used to route around the way his mind refused to hold location clues.

Frustrated, Moishe tried to replay the video, but he couldn't find it. "Where's the link?" he asked the computer. He went back to last weekend's email, hunting for the first video, but no dice. "Oh, come on," he yelled at the laptop, before slamming the lid shut.

The buck snorted in his mind, sound fury and a wave of tines and threat.

"Oh fuck off," Moishe whispered.

****

Moishe realized something, once he'd spent the week trying to find the deer camera again. He discovered just how much time he'd been spending on the study.

Every night, around eight, after he'd disposed of the necessary homework, he queued up his four video feeds. Even with all of them running at eight times standard and simultaneous, midnight usually found him just finishing up. "No wonder they only want me to do six weeks of this," he told himself.

He hadn't lost track of homework. Yet. But here he was, adding time each night to hunt down a camera that suddenly didn't exist. Moishe searched all the emails for the fifth link. The one that would show him the field and brush and the deer herd.

He went through the week this way, until Saturday night's email came in, auto-generated by one of Rickie's systems. Accompanied once again by Chris's snores, Moishe stifled a yell when he found a fifth camera link. "Finally," he whispered.

He opened the other four, minimized the windows, then opened the precious fifth camera feed. "Now I've got you."

The hours slipped by; the character of the light changed. Then Moishe remembered how the links and the camera had disappeared from his inbox. He fumbled around, trying to remember, and then search for, the key sequence that would capture the screen image.

Then the doe stepped out into the camera's frame.

All ideas of capturing the screen's image drifted away. Moishe clicked the window to fill his monitor; the doe stared back at him, then, like the buck had, she seemed to respond. To know, somehow, that Moishe watched her. She stomped, one quick beat, and raised her tail.

"No," Moishe whispered. "Don't..."

But she did. She crouched, lifted the white tail that gave her species its name to its fullest, and bounded out of view. Behind her, Moishe caught the briefest of glimpses of the others; he couldn't distinguish doe or buck, only a pair of brown-gray figures disappearing into the last of the night.

"Son of a bitch," Moishe muttered.

His hands wanted him to close it all down again. They almost ached, almost reached for the mouse without Moishe's instigation. But Moishe caught himself, hung on, grabbed the mouse and opened the email again.

Four links. But the window he cared about was still there, off to the side. The camera still showed him a view, a place somewhere close that held a bit of nature that wasn't an accident. Moishe could almost smell the grass; he fought the sneeze that his body begged for in response.

"Ok, right." His hands trembled. Some part of him fought, still, to close this up and go on to other things. He'd been up all night, after all. Just close it up, get some sleep, get through one more week and back to class and labs with a little money in the account. "It's just biology stuff anyway," Moishe whispered.

Instead of letting his hands continue that way, Moishe pulled the laptop from its docking station. Flipped the lid open, so it wouldn't accidentally go into sleep mode, or worse. Reboot and close the window forever.

His only connection now to whatever place it was still showing on the laptop's monitor. Moishe fumbled his way into shoes and jacket, pausing only to gently brush a fingertip across the trackpad. Fighting each time to keep that finger from going on to close the open window.

Moishe bounced off the tiled walls. He punched three different floor buttons on the elevator before he got the lobby. He tripped on every step from the dorm lobby down to the outside world.

Every bump on the way, and his hand drifted to the trackpad of its own accord. Moishe bit back curses and stumbled out into the green space at the back side of the dorms.

"No cameras in the dorm areas," Martinez had told him. Four eras of dorm construction. The towers Moishe roomed in, the older three story rambling stone quad where the athletes and most of the other Honors College kids stayed; the newer buildings like apartment complexes just a couple blocks off campus. Each with some bit of green park space, tree and grass boundaries that should have been perfect for Martinez' study. "I figured it's better safe than sorry. Privacy laws."

Moishe stood in the park space behind the towers, the park holding just enough open grass for the frisbee and soccer devotees to descend upon in a few hours. He stared at the screen, turning around, laptop over his arms so his hand wouldn't catch the mouse pad on its own.

He tried to orient himself like he would have to a compass. This made sense, somehow, here where lack of sleep and confusion and the darkness of night slowly disappearing for another day held Moishe close. Moishe had never successfully used a real compass in his life. Even with the GPS on his phone, he just listened to it and turned left, or right, where it told him to.

The few times anyone let him drive, anyway.

In the here and the now, Moishe pointed the laptop and stumbled somewhere. Not into the heart of campus, though; when he crossed the street to the neighborhood bordering campus, he didn't know he was walking through what would have been traffic in more regular hours. Moishe tripped over the curb going and coming.

Somehow holding onto the laptop. And somehow not closing the window on the field.

Time and space spun; part of his mind, the one that wanted nothing more than to get back into bed and forget about this nonsense, knew full well they'd all be lost somewhere and have to send an email to Gracie to come get them... should have meant something. Didn't. Moishe knew only the field, the grass smell, and that his hands wanted to betray him.

The wetness, his shoes damp with dew and grass seeds rubbing at his skin, broke through Moishe's brain fog. Little by little, he acknowledged the world waking around him. The sun poked one, then two beams over the horizon, true light coming. A bird, one of the tiny singers Moishe still wasn't sure of, fidgeted and bitched at him from somewhere over to his left.

Grass seeds irritated his ankles while late season pollen twitched his sinuses. He'd suffer for both, Moishe knew, old enemies of skin and runny noses because hay fever was a bitch and psoriasis rode pillion.

Moishe raised his eyes from the screen.

He stood in the middle of the field. Yards away, trees marched left to right, brush tangling their bases. Moishe turned his head, slowly, to there: where the does had disappeared. Right there. And to the right, there, that's where she'd come into view just an... hour ago?

Moishe didn't want to rewind the video; his hand warned him that it, and the rest of Moishe, the real part of Moishe that didn't go running off after figments of imagination, the rational, mature Moishe would close this motherfucker down and start typing a "Rescue Me" message to Gracie just as soon as he had the good damned sense to put this shit aside and come back to the fucking world. Please.

So Moishe didn't know from time. Here was only the daylight threatening, the morning breeze responding, over an empty field. Had it been an hour? Had it been an instant? He couldn't answer that.

But he could see the view on the screen, and the one he stood in the front of. Moishe turned now, all the way around. Get the whole of it, he told himself. Where are we?

And. More importantly. Where's the camera? The one his laptop insisted should be right over his shoulder.

Moishe stood in the middle of the field. Just like he'd seen, just a little pasture, maybe two acres. Knee high grass fading after the first real cold front of the fall.

Behind him, Moishe saw only the parking lot for the quad dorms. The only possible place to put a camera would have been the street light, red security call box its most prominent feature. Moishe walked over there, just in case.

But no. No little gray and brown camouflaged plastic box. Nothing. And when Moishe turned back to the field, the view from the laptop showed him this couldn't be it. All the long hours watching the video feeds for the study and Moishe knew better.

He walked back into the field, letting that feeling back, the one that he'd only just realized that everyone else had in their head.

That he knew exactly where he was. And that this field, the one he stood in the middle of, wet feet and all, calling the dawn to life, this spot was one that Moishe had come to apurpose. He could find this place again.

Moishe shut the laptop. The rational voice quieted, and the urge to close the camera feed went with it. Moishe turned one more time to place himself and the view in his head. Then he turned around and crossed the street to the quad dorms.

He didn't notice the stray cat crouched on the dorm room steps. Nor the barred owl spiraling just over the field.

****

The field lingered all that week. The last week of Moishe's participation in the study. Friday was the official last day; Moishe got the email from Rickie early that morning.

"Thank you for everything. I'll close out your logins this afternoon. You should get your last check next week."

And just like that... only.

The space in his head still filled Moishe's mind. Monday night, he dreamt of walking it. Outside, of both his mind and the dorm room window, the moon waxed toward full. The place rotated around him; the deer came earlier, each night.

"The moon, not the dawn," Moishe whispered to himself Thursday morning around three. The idea woke him; he told the message to the ceiling. But neither the ceiling nor his half-asleep self understood the message.

The deer appeared in Moishe's dreams Tuesday night.

Wednesday, they dominated the dream. Thursday and Friday...

Blood dripped down his legs, it had to be blood because pain shot from the joints. Pain, something grabbed him. Moishe looked down. Talons, claws, gripped his hips, the nails tore his skin. He jerked; other claws gripped his shoulders. Something rode him.

"Your moment comes," it whispered into his ear.

Moishe drifted between terror and pain until the almost-full moon set and Saturday's dawn took over. He finally slumbered. And woke after lunch.

"Do I need to ask about new friends?" Gracie asked via text. "You never sleep late."

Something his parents had complained about since Moishe was old enough to get his own cereal and turn on his own cartoons. Something in his head refused to just stay in bed when the sun rose. "No 'friends'," Moishe answered. "Just the end of the study. Finally catching up on my sleep."

Which was true enough. "Meet you for Chinese?"

"Of course." Saturday afternoon's ritual, they'd started the long weekend before their freshmen year started.

Gracie filled most of the conversation; neither of them noticed the transition. Moishe usually chattered just as much or more than Gracie did. The field and the full moon just starting to rise as they walked back to the dorm rooms ran as constant undercurrent to Moishe's friendship talk.

"You'll have to get another job," Gracie pointed out as Moishe made ready to climb the stairs to the tower's lobby.

He shrugged. The scholarship covered most of his tuition, loans did for that and the dorm room and food. He'd known the books and sundries had to come from somewhere; the guy in the administration building who'd put the financial aid package together had pointed the way to work study right from the beginning. Moishe didn't say anything, he just turned to go.

Then stopped, one hand on the stair rail. "Hey, Grace?"

"Yeah?"

The field flashed into his mind. And the pain the nightmare had inflicted. "Ah, nothing, just a brain fart. See you Monday."

****

Moishe went through his Saturday night the way he always did. Homework, a run down to the cafeteria for some ice cream before they closed up. A couple hours of reading with some random movie streaming on his laptop for noise. Then a shower and bed.

Where he stared at the ceiling instead of drifting off. Moishe wanted to chalk that up to having slept all morning. "See what happens? You'll be skipping class next and sleeping all day." Like some of the other kids did, showing up for finals for a class where the lady teaching hadn't seen you since the first day of the semester, going "Who the hell are you?"

Then Moishe registered the full moon lighting up the room. And his mind forced the dream phrase from his lips. "The moon not the dawn."

Chris had found a friend; Moishe didn't know anything more, two years roommates and he couldn't quite find the courage to ask Chris any details. He just knew that his roommate had started coming home early mornings instead of late nights.

And that he could get out of bed and make ready with the lights on and no concern for the noise.

Moishe didn't bring the laptop, or anything else except his jacket. And socks. He remembered the socks this time.

He walked through the midnight of campus like he knew where he was going. A strange feeling. The moon's full illumination and the power of his mind holding on to the world around him well enough for Moishe to believe he was going someplace, and could get there without trouble, intoxicated him.

Moishe felt like he floated to the center of the field.

Every step of the way, shadows the size of small animals flickered in his wake. And followed him.

When he stepped into the middle of the field, the moon lit the space. And lunar midnight rose to greet him.

Moishe held his breath. Across the field, three figures stepped from the trees.

Then rose to stand upright. Between the scant tree shadows and the full view of the open grass, the buck stood and became a human figure.

Almost. The figure loomed tall, and from his forehead grew now a pair of blackberry vines, they twisted higher from the forest king's forehead than Moishe stood above the ground.

In front of the king figure, the does walked now as queens of the night.

With talons glowing from their fingers and toes. Moishe's shoulders and hips screamed a brief flash of pain echo to the figures standing in front of him. "The sacrifice appears..."

"As we have called..." "And now he is ours..."

"As is necessary," the thorn-headed figure in the back concluded.

Moishe had assigned king and queen, female and male, because that's what his mind threw out as a reference. The closer he looked, the more his mind now ran screaming from answers. These... people... were too alien. Too far away from human to know anything.

Other than the claws that reached to take him. Moishe tried to scream. Only nothing came of it. His mouth refused to open. His legs should have shivered, should have turned to run because he begged them to. But none of these things happened.

Instead, his legs told him of something else. Of a cat's tail, and its owner, weaving its way between his legs.

Others, then. The thorn-crowned head filled Moishe vision, but now behind that figure a dog appeared, head low, crouched over its paws and tail stretched straight out behind. Shadows too, small and dark they slid across the three faces.

The barred owl settled on Moishe's shoulder. Gently, though the prick of her talons echoed the nightmare pain and the silvered claws of the three. The owl clicked her beak, speaking in a language just as alien to Moishe as the nightmare fey bearing down on him.

The pair in front stopped their advance on Moishe. But they didn't let their hands, claws, rest, either, Moishe recognized. "This is ours fairly taken..." "Little birds can join him..."

"Or fly away safe," their third concluded.

The owl clicked her beak again. From his ankles, Moishe felt the cat's answering purr-growl; the dog said nothing, only bared his teeth in a grin. Moishe knew this one; the street mutt fought casually, and often.

"To protect..." "One must usually bring forces..."

"And such few you have."

Click, purr. And now, from behind a growl.

And the first reaction beyond words. The crowned third shifted its weight, turned to the dog; the dog skipped back from that gaze.

But he didn't run, he remained, Moishe told himself. He stayed.

The entire tableau remained, held their places. Moishe didn't come to this place having ever considered the smell of violence coming.

Then... in the middle of campus, the administration building, and a fountain in front of it, framed the center of the place. The administration building had been put together when floods weren't a grandparent's stories.

A great stone stair rose from the fountain's level in two tiers to the building's entrance. In the middle of the relief between runs sat a bronze statue of the campus mascot.

Here, now. The bronze figure stretched from her crouch of ages. Twitched her tail and sniffed the wind. Purred. Growled.

Flattened her ears against her skull and screamed her nightmare's answer to the full moon and the sky above.

The scream reverberated across the field, and between the combatants. Moishe felt it, the ancient call so often compared to a woman's cry of terror. Moishe felt torn between the three fey and the animals who'd come to his aid. He quailed from the forces that scream called forth...

And then he remembered the cougar's favorite prey. Moishe grinned, then.

And the nightmare fey stumbled back, away from the sound and what she threatened them with. The dog sidled around them, even the old scarred warrior giving them the chance to run away. And so they did.

Silver under the moonlight, taller than thunderheads, yet by the time the tree shadows claimed these nightmares they had shrunk once again to two and one glimpses of fur and white tail flags waving their fright.

Moishe shuddered, head to toe, and fell to his knees. By the time he could bring himself to look, his only companion in the empty field was that he'd started with: the full moon and the stars beyond. Moishe shook himself free and stumbled away for home.

****

Weeks later, Moishe and Gracie took their lunch to the administration building's porch. One of Gracie's favorite people-watching spots. With finals coming on, and one of those fall days where the cold front has just cleared the air and the sun and frost have battled their way to a draw, Gracie wanted as much time in the sun as she could get before they disappeared back into study mode.

Moishe settled himself at the bronze cougar's base. The idea in his head, that he finally could trust his instincts and be able to walk around campus without getting lost, had disappeared.

The moonlit field and what had happened there faded too. But only, so far, to the same level as a well-loved story. Moishe leaned against the cat's paw.

"Which one are you going to take?" Gracie asked.

Moishe had gone looking for more work study programs. This far through the semester, he'd mostly found "Check back at the start of the spring term" as the default answer. Still, he'd finally picked up a lead on a couple of jobs with that magic combination of money in the budget and too few hands to use it.

The first one came from the engineering department. Gracie had had to walk Moishe over there each time he'd gone to talk to the professor. That section of campus was, for some reason, even more of a nightmare for Moishe than the business building they had to traverse to get to their Saturday dinner.

"If you take the chemical engineering job I'll brain you," Gracie said. "I am not spending three nights a week shepherding you across campus."

Moishe shifted against the cat's leg.

Gracie noticed his discomfort. "I keep telling you, it's more comfortable down here." The statue stood on a granite base; Gracie preferred the ground level with her back against the granite and her butt on her backpack.

"It's not that," Moishe began, but then stopped. Explaining what he'd felt wouldn't get him anywhere. "No, Gracie, I'm not taking the chemical engineering job."

Not that Professor Denov really wanted him. "A pure chemist's not all that useful to me, kid. But we do need someone who knows their way around a lab. So the job's yours if you want it. I guess." Moishe didn't really mind taking the second option.

Herding data for Professor Feliciano in the psych department. He'd be able to watch the kestrel every day; Moishe figured she had her eyes on the ancient live-oak trees fencing the psych departments little green border as a spring nesting site. "I'm going to work for Professor Feliciano. I emailed her this morning."

"Way cool. Which means you're buying me dinner on work nights." The quad, where Gracie's dorm took up space, sat just across the green space from the psych department.

And Moishe had to walk through the quad, anyway. That's how he'd trained himself to find his way back to his own dorm room.

Moishe laughed. "Deal," he said, and then the friend picked up their trash and headed back to the finals grind.

Moishe rubbing his shoulder absentmindedly the whole time.

The one the bronze cougar had purred against when Moishe announced his choice of work study.