Midway Relics and Dying Breeds: A Tor.Com Original Read Online Free Page A

and those reasons had taught them not to intrude on the private grief of others.
    The boxy cube of my tent was sitting untended on the forest floor near the larger, already erected tent that held the animal husbandry supplies. I pressed my thumb to the tag, waiting long enough for the microsensors to register my identity before jumping back and out of the way. Our tents were rejected milspec, the sort of thing that seemed like a dandy idea on paper, and proved to be more trouble than they were worth once they started rolling out of the replicators and into actual field conditions. Confirm your ID with a tent and watch it unpack like magic, preparing to surround you in all the comforts of home while out in the wilderness! And technically that was true—the tents unpacked themselves, handling the setup process with a speed and elegance that human hands could only envy.
    That was the problem. They unpacked so quickly that people could be seriously injured if they stood too close. One of the younger cousins had suffered a broken leg. One of the older cousins had managed to lose a hand. Those were the sort of injuries that resulted from standing too close to an opening tent when it was wrapping itself around obstacles. A closing tent …
    None of us would ever forget Cousin Mae, who had decided that she could no longer live with her life and its contradictions, and had ordered her tent to collapse itself while she was standing inside. The synthsilk was capable of applying far more pressure than the human body could withstand. It was also watertight. Mae died quickly, and she didn’t leave any mess for anyone else to clean up. Knowing her, she would have been proud at how successful a suicide she was.
    The tent finished unpacking itself in less than thirty seconds. Unlike Davo, I had no furniture to move in; just the cot, wall shelves, and comms terminal that were built into the tent itself. I wiggled my toes in the dust outside the door once, like a prayer or a promise to the forest, before I opened the flap and let myself inside.
    *   *   *
    Supposedly, the entire West Coast has free, reliable connectivity through the cloud, which accounts for the trees and raccoons and robust weather patterns all being considered individuals who have a right to be heard. And that’s generally true when you’re near the heart of Cascadia, or skirting the poppy fields outside of Oakland. They have strong repeaters and self-propagating smart dust there, and they keep the signals flying. With the carnival camped deep in the mossy, damp-aired heart of the forest outside Portland, I had to negotiate with eight different local channels before I could get them to share signal strength and boost my call high enough to catch the attention of a relay satellite. Those are free and reliable, once you can establish a connection.
    The Bone Yard runs on a virtually antiquated VoIP system once a local connection has been made, which is in turn rigged to screamers for those occasions when calls come in and there’s no one in the house to answer them. I sat on the edge of my bed, pleating my skirt between my fingers, and waited for the screamer to catch somebody’s attention.
    I was in luck: I had only waited about a minute when the neutral black screen was replaced by the weathered, well-loved face of my grandfather, Angelo Freeman. He smiled when he saw me, his teeth still white against the brown of his skin, despite his advanced age. Unlike most of the men in our family, he had never smoked, never chewed tobacco, never even taken up drinking coffee. He swore the world was stimulant enough, and that a midway man needed a smile that could outshine the moon. From most people, that would have sounded stupid. From Grandpapa, it sounded like scripture.
    “Ansley,” he said, eyes crinkling at the edges. His voice held all the warmth that Davo’s lacked. “My dearest girl. What moves you to call an old man so late in the evening?”
    “As if you