Uncanny Magazine Issue 33 Page 3

  Silke turned up at Claudia’s apartment on Sunday morning, just as she was about to leave for church.

  “I heard you killed Erika,” she whispered. “Is it true?”

  “Yes, of course,” Claudia answered loudly.

  Silke drooped. Claudia bundled her out the door, downstairs, and onto the streetcar. At the gate, she told the military policeman Silke was her sister. He signed them in with a smile.

  “No, I didn’t,” she said when the first hymn was in full strain. “I told her to cut and dye her hair, gain some weight, try to be inconspicuous.”

  “You’re smarter than me. I came back and told my opa I couldn’t do it,” Silke said. “I said if he wanted to find another girl to milk the Major General, he should just slit my throat right then.”

  “Why would they send us to kill her?”

  “It could be a message. Do your duty and don’t complain or…” Silke drew a manicured finger across her throat. Up in front, the drummer caught the movement and blinked at them, startled. Claudia threw him a sunny smile and patted Silke’s hand.

  “Will your ruse work, do you think?” Silke asked before they parted at the railway station.

  “I don’t know. I hope so,” she said. “But one thing’s for sure, I’m not bored anymore.”

  The next time Claudia visited Frankfurt, Silke hauled Valentina off to the toilet, giving Claudia time to tell the other two about Erika.

  “What if my opa sends me to Hamburg?” Axel asked. “What do I do?”

  “Don’t kill her, that’s what.” Claudia rapped her knuckle on Axel’s sternum for emphasis. He batted her hand away.

  “Stop. You just want to touch me.”

  “Everyone does, dear.” Monique patted the boy’s beefy shoulder. “I wonder why she won’t leave. She could have a lover, I suppose.”

  “Maybe you should go ask her.” Claudia meant it as a joke, but Monique’s eyes brightened with purpose.

  “She’s obsessed with the music,” Monique said the next week, her breath hot in Claudia’s ear. “Did you notice?”

  Claudia nodded. The Hamburg songs were similar enough to the church band for Claudia to see the appeal, with riffs, backbeats, and harmonies, sly bent pitches, noisy timbres, and sudden clear tones that echoed in Claudia’s skull from Sunday to Sunday.

  “Is she being sensible?” Claudia asked.

  “She did what you said. Cropped her hair and bleached it blonde. But she’s noticeable. The short hair makes her eyes this big.” Monique circled her thumbs and forefingers and raised them to her eyes like goggles.

  “Let’s hope nobody looks for her.”

  That hope lasted only until midnight, when Claudia spotted the corner of a train ticket peeking from between the lips of Valentina’s velvet clutch.

  “Angel, darling,” Claudia purred. “Why are you sitting so far away?” She slid her knee between Valentina’s thighs and moved in close, gently forcing her classmate against the padded seat. After a moment of resistance, Valentina melted into her arms. She lowered her lips to the silken skin under Valentina’s ear, reached behind, and slid the clutch over to Monique.

  Twenty minutes later, when Valentina reached for it, her clutch was right at hand. She clicked it open, retrieved her powder and lipstick, and discreetly repaired her smeared complexion.

  At the end of the night, Claudia, Silke, and Monique were far back in the coat-check queue. Axel had escorted Valentina to the front of the line, like the gallant boy he was.

  “It’s what you thought,” Monique said later. “Return to Hamburg.”

  “Oh no,” Silke groaned. “Valentina will never let her get away.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Monique whispered. “They’ve given her a pistol.”

  Erika had been warned twice; she knew the risks. If she wouldn’t save herself, what could any of them do? The four of them agreed to go home, not interfere, let Valentina complete her mission. In the dark of early morning, they kissed and hugged and pretended to go their separate ways, but they all got on the north-bound train anyway. Valentina in first-class, the others squished into the third-class car.

  Claudia slid into the seat beside Silke.

  “We are ridiculous,” she said.

  Silke shrugged.

  “We have the advantage. We know where she’s going. Perhaps we can help.”

  “Help do what? Save Erika, or kill her?”

  “Save them both. If Valentina goes through with this, she’ll never forgive herself.”

  Claudia shook her head grimly.

  “It’s true,” Silke insisted. “I know her true nature.”

  “That’s pure romance.” Claudia took Silke’s hand between both of hers. “You can never know what’s in a person’s heart.”

  “When a person is at their most unguarded, their most passionate, that’s who they really are. I’ve seen that side of Valentina a hundred times. So have you. She’s a darling.”

  Claudia grimaced. “No, she’s a rigid survivor with a pistol in her purse.”

  In Hamburg, they scrounged disguises from the station’s lost items kiosk—hats, scarves, a widow’s veil for Silke, a knit cap with ear flaps for Axel. Claudia tugged it over his hair and pulled the narrow brim down to his eyebrows. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his woolen coat and tried to look inconspicuous. It didn’t work.

  “You’re too big to hide,” Monique said. “You’ll have to stay here.”

  “I will not,” he said, stubborn as a child.

  They followed Valentina at a discreet distance. Valentina gripped her clutch so tightly, she’d poked her fingers through the tips of her knit gloves.

  “You see, she’s nervous,” Silke said. They were stopped at a busy street corner, cowering together against the frigid North Sea wind that scoured the intersection. “She won’t be able to do it.”

  “If she doesn’t kill Erika, we’ll have to,” Claudia said.

  The other three stared at her in horror. When the traffic cleared, Claudia led them across the street.

  “Think about it. The opas don’t need us for this. Erika could have been dead weeks ago. They want to see where our training went wrong, and whether it can be put right. It’s an experiment. A test. Silke failed it. I failed it. How many more chances will they give us?”

  They’d come to a four lane road thick with industrial traffic from the port. Valentina was far ahead, just a speck in the distance. Claudia stepped off the curb, raised her hands to stop the trucks, and then shooed her classmates across the road.

  “If we want to live, we have to kill Erika,” she said when they had all reached the sidewalk safely.

  “No,” said Silke.

  “No,” said Axel.

  “Absolutely not,” said Monique.

  “Then we have to let Valentina kill her.” That didn’t fly with her classmates either. “Do you have a better suggestion?”

  “We could go home and kill our opas,” Silke said. “It would be easy.”

  “I’m not killing anyone,” Monique said. “I was made for love, not murder.”

  Axel nodded. “Me too.”

  “It wouldn’t work, anyway,” Claudia said. “There’s always more opas.”

  If Opa had given her had a rifle, Claudia would have killed Erika the first time. Death at a distance, like a Stalingrad sniper. Her failure to complete the mission was Opa’s fault. If he hadn’t played games with her, this all could have been over weeks ago.

  A pistol. That’s what Claudia needed. She’d leave the others to distract Valentina, sneak into the club and kill Erika. It was the only option. But first, she’d have to find one.

  It was possible. Hamburg’s red light district was notorious. She could find a pistol tucked into the belt of a pimp or loan shark, or even just a scared country boy come into the big city for a night on the town, bringing his daddy’s Luger along for protection.

  As they entered St. Pauli, Claudia began assessing the men they passed, guessing which o
nes might be carrying weapons, and trying to spot any tell-tale lumps under their coats.

  When they got to the club, a bass riff leaked from the door, punctuated by the rhythmic thump of a low-pitched drum. Valentina slipped inside and the other three followed close behind. Claudia paused for a moment, looking around, trying to make her best guess at a likely mark. She chose a short, thin man. He wore a thickly padded jacket and looked like the kind who would need a pistol for confidence. She glided past him and pretended to catch her heel. When he reached to catch her, she slid her fingers along his belt. Nothing. He scowled and pushed her away, then checked for his wallet. She gave him an innocent smile.

  Her clumsy attempt didn’t dishearten her. Inside would be better, where every sense was deadened by the press of bodies jouncing to the beat.

  Silke, Axel, and Monique had intercepted Valentina and hauled her off into a corner of the foyer. Inside Valentina’s purse, clutched in her arms, was the one weapon Claudia could locate with certainty. She could join them, take the clutch from Valentina. If she moved fast, they might not even have a chance to stop her. But she didn’t even know if Erika was in the club. So instead of joining her friends, she made her way to the bar and positioned herself at the end, where she could survey the people jostling for drinks.

  When a thick-necked man waved to get the bartender’s attention, Claudia caught a glint of metal under his jacket, and the leather strap of a shoulder holster against his white shirt. The bartender passed him a foaming pint. He drained half of it in two gulps, then held the glass high as he moved through the press toward the stage. Claudia followed.

  If she could be slick enough, quick enough, he wouldn’t know who had taken his pistol. He would make a scene but that was fine—she could use it for cover while she did her job, because there was Erika, at the side of the stage. Her bleached hair caught the light like a target.

  One smooth movement, perfectly timed. She slid her hand inside the thick-necked man’s jacket just as a young woman swung her ample hips into his thigh. As he reached out to steady himself on the shoulder of a friend, Claudia palmed the pistol. Then she ducked low and moved through the crowd, deer-swift and graceful.

  Claudia knelt under a table, checked the ammunition; thumbed the safety. The weapon was heavy, its grip cold on her palm. Seconds now, only seconds. If the thick-necked man was as competent as he looked, he’d soon notice soon the missing weight. She stood, raised the pistol, and framed Erika’s bright head in her deadly sights.

  The music, the band, the crowd, the thick-necked man—they all disappeared. All that was left was Erika, the pistol, and her four dear friends arguing in the foyer. If she killed Erika, she’d be gone forever—and then she’d lose more. Silke, Monika, Axel, and even Valentina, gone from her life, leaving her with Opa and a future she couldn’t face.

  She lowered the pistol and flipped the safety lever. She shouldered her way across the floor and dropped the weapon on the thick-necked man’s foot.

  “Keep it,” she told him. And then she grabbed Monika’s elbow. She pulled her across the dance floor and out to the foyer, where the others were still huddled in a corner, arguing in whispers.

  “Let’s go,” she told them. “We’ve delayed long enough.”

  “Delayed?” Silke repeated.

  “Delayed what?” Monique asked.

  “Our lives.” Claudia grinned. “No opas. No Americans. Just the six of us, and the whole wide world. It’s all waiting.”

  (Editors’ Note: “So You Want to Be a Honeypot” is read by Joy Piedmont on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 33A.)

  © 2020 Kelly Robson

  Kelly Robson is a Canadian short fiction writer. Her novelette “A Human Stain” won the 2018 Nebula Award, and she has won both the 2019 and 2016 Aurora Awards for best Short Story. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, Astounding, Aurora, and Sunburst Awards. In 2018, her time travel adventure Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach debuted to high critical praise. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife SF writer A. M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.

  The Sycamore and the Sybil

  by Alix E. Harrow

  (Content note: sexual coercion/assault and suicidal ideation.)

  Before I was a sycamore I was a woman, and before I was a woman I was a girl, and before I was a girl I was a wet seed wild in the hot-pulp belly of my mother. I remember it: a pulsing blackness, veins unfurling in the dark like roots spreading through the hidden places of the earth. You remember things different, once you’re a tree.

  Of course that’s about all trees can do: stand there and remember. We can’t run or spit or sing; we can’t fuck or dance or get good and drunk on a full moon; we can’t hold our mother’s hands or stroke the cheek of a fevered child. We’re towers without any doors or windows; we are prisons and prisoners both, impregnable and alone.

  But they can’t hurt us any-damn-more, at least not without working up a sweat, and that’s not nothing.

  (If you’re wondering why a woman would trade her limbs and her beating heart for a little slice of safety, well—maybe you’re young. Maybe the world has changed. Maybe you’re dumb as a moss-eaten stump.)

  It’s the same bargain we’ve been making for centuries, one way or another: give up your life in order to keep living. Give him your saltwater skin; give him your voice; give him your thousand stories. Give up your body and live forever rooted to the bank of the Big Sandy, dreaming and watching. Do what you can to stay alive. That’s just how it is.

  But sometimes I think, in the slow tree-sap way I think now: It shouldn’t be.

  It was early fall the first time she came running through my woods.

  September is one of my better months: my leaves go all gold-speckled and copper-kissed, and my bark shines white as a knuckle-bone. I arrange my fallen leaves like a skirt around my roots, a graceful arc of rust and red, and when the sun slants just right even the squirrels have to stop their gossiping to admire me.

  But she hardly noticed me. She kept her eyes on the ground, footsteps pounding. You don’t have time to admire the view when there’s a wolf snapping at your heels.

  Oh, not a real wolf—there hasn’t been a real wolf in Crow County since I was a girl with legs instead of limbs and the state paid $3 a pelt for them, and anyway those poor creatures never hunted women except in fairytales.

  This was one of those two-legged wolves who wore a coat and a tie, who waxed their hair smooth as brass and smiled too damn much. He was a handsome wolf, nicely-dressed and clean, but so was mine. They’ll eat you just the same, in the end.

  The girl was a looker, too—sugar-maple hair curling around a white face, legs like pale birch branches beneath her skirt—but it didn’t really matter. Wolves don’t hunt deer for their looks.

  “Wait,” he called, voice honey-soft and pleading. “Please.”

  It was the please that did it, that thin coat of politeness like paint over a rotten fence-post. The girl stopped, so close to me now I could smell the clammy uncertainty rising off her skin, and turned back to face him.

  “Kat, my love, don’t run from me. Never run from me.” His face was fetchingly flushed, a single waxen curl hanging against his cheek.

  “I didn’t—I’m not sure—” She was backing towards my trunk, leaning away from him.

  He stepped closer. “Not sure of what? My love for you?” He reached for her hands, trapped them limp and white in his grip. “How could you doubt it? I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you.”

  The owl that lived in my hollow branch gave a small cough of disgust. Ain’t the first time he’s said that, she muttered. Owls tend to overhear a lot of this kind of thing, given their habit of swooping silently through the night and perching in haylofts and trees, and in general they hold low opinions of romance, sex, and menfolk. Minnie, who was almost twenty and had seen more human night-doings that most owls, was bitter as twice-brewed coffee.


  The wolf reached a hand to cup the girl’s face, his eyes shining with earnestness. “Tell me you feel the same way.”

  She hesitated. I felt the tremor of it through the earth, the way her weight shifted back and away. “I—” But then he was kissing her and her hands were still trapped in his like a pair of fresh-killed rabbits and her back was pressed against the coolness of my trunk.

  Once when I was still a sapling, a hunter staked a steel trap among my green roots and a fox found it two days later. I’d felt every panicked heartbeat, tasted every hot-penny drop of its blood. The girl wasn’t scrabbling or whining, but her pulse beat the same desperate rhythm against my bark. Trapped.

  Maybe you’re thinking: No, she isn’t. Maybe you’re wondering why she hasn’t tried to run or scream or put her hand to his chest and say, “No thank you, sir,” because after all he’s a gentleman-wolf in a button-down shirt, not some slavering beast. But I could feel the hunger of him, the way he pressed her against my trunk hard enough for my bark to carve patterns in her flesh. She wouldn’t have gotten far.

  There was one other thing she could have done, of course, but I guess she didn’t know the words.

  My Great Aunt Daphne taught them to me when I was young: old, secret words, the ones you say when the wolf is at your throat and there’s nowhere left to run and you don’t know any witching strong enough to strike out at him, so you strike inward, instead.

  You say the words and you are no longer a woman. You are a slim little maple, leaves damp-pink in the spring, or a juniper with powder-blue berries, or a sycamore rising tall and round on the banks of the Big Sandy. You are fleshless and voiceless and alone, and so you are finally safe.

  I could have told them to her. I could have written the words in the shadow-pattern of my leaves against the sky, or whispered them in a puff of pollen, or pressed them into her skin.

  But I didn’t. Because speaking them would have stolen her beating heart and her pale-birch legs and her maple-red curls, because she would never have seen her Great Aunt Daphne again or her Mama or her baby brother with his dandelion-fluff hair. Because her only friends would be chickadees and moles and the grumpy barred owl who lived in her dead branch, and her heartwood would turn dark and hard as a coal-seam.