She Walks in Shadows Read Online Free Page A

I’m the only person who can read the calculations in it, and see the angles and velocity. I’m wrong, though. Recognition spreads over my mother’s face for the first time. We finally have a common language to speak to each other.
    She tells me about a night when she was younger than I am now. She tells me about a pattern she only made once. She gave it to a fisherman and told him her usual marketing ploy: It would keep him safe from all the dangers above and below the water. She lied. She sent him out wearing a beacon that shouted at the heart of the Moon. It made him see things. He still babbles about the underwater city and the sunken dead that drifted up from the seabed. Even that wasn’t loud enough to bring something down from the sky.
    She can’t make it herself anymore, but she whispers all the stitches in my ear. I write them in machine language on the inside of my eyelids. I can visualize it in copper and cores. It will camouflage itself against the endless commands my coworkers weave day after day. When the time is right, the shining sign will call out to something that lives beyond here.
    ... knit one, purl two, knit one ....
    ... 1001 ....
    The astronauts will return but not alone. They will bring the shadow from the Moon down, finally. It will be enormous. Its landing will send out ripples as large as the Pacific. Its hooves will trample the street lights and skyscrapers until there is nothing left but starlight. I will stand on the rocks by the bay and wrap my sweater tightly around my shoulders, knowing that I will be the last left standing. My work will change the world.

VIOLET IS THE COLOR OF YOUR ENERGY
    Nadia Bulkin
    ABIGAIL GARDNER NÉE Cuzak was sitting on the bathroom floor, thinking about the relationship that mice in mazes have with death, when a many-splendored light shot down from the stars like a touch of divine Providence. Abigail hurried to the bathroom window above the toilet, but just as she put her fingers on the smudge-stained glass, a loud noise — not an explosion, more like a diver’s plunge — burst from the field and pushed her back onto her heels. The impact tripped the perimeter lights; she could see shockwaves rippling the corn. But there was no smoke, no fire, only the faintest tint of red-blue-purple now rapidly melting into night.
    She heard Nate throw off the covers, muttering, “What the fuck?” And then, sharper, “Abby!”
    The two of them rushed downstairs, a shadow of the team they had once been when they were first trying to forge a life together out of the money they’d saved in college, him at the chem lab, her at the campus store. “I bet it’s our buddy Pierce,” Nate muttered, barreling through the kitchen, running into a chair in the dark. If it hurt, he didn’t show it. “He probably cooked up some radio-controlled boondoggle to mess with the crop. Probably aiming for the sprinklers. Or just trying to nuclear-waste the whole damn thing.”
    Abigail did not think that sounded much like him. Ambrose might have enjoyed eating up the little farms around him, counting up his tripling acres with a glass of whiskey, but he hated parlor tricks, didn’t think he needed to lower himself to sabotage. She said nothing to Nate. It was better to let him cling to that bone if it kept him occupied.
    Nate had his gun. Abigail had a fireplace poker. Her farm cats were skulking by the flower pots, making low, scratchy howls at something in the corn. Abigail followed him to the front as quietly as possible, her bare feet curling around dry stalks and kernels and poisoned insect corpses, but she had the feeling they would not find what Nate was looking for. They would not find any ruddy farmhand with a twistable neck, nor a small, broken, remote-controlled drone. Nate would periodically shush her and veer in a new direction, but Abigail knew there was no life out there. The field was so quiet, she could hear the cats’ growling. Though the air sure smelled strange —