Red and Black.

There used to be others, I heard. Lights we can't imagine because we've never seen any other than Red and Black. Red like the vastness of the sky above, Black like the roiling waves we ride. Red like the lightnings that power our vessel, Black like my drowned love's eyes.

The Cap shrieked her mourning call, the one we'd all been waiting for and dreading. Her long howl was our final warning, low electric current turning into no electric current, low hope to none. The Ruxandra flickered, her bright red lights dimming to crimson before brightening up again for one final time. Then, she went black. Whatever was left of her spark was gathered to the emergency pack at the back, the engine rumbling an emptier tune than before, trundling out in coughs and gasps.

Before he died, my dad fished stars for a living. Sucked them straight out of the sky with a glorified mechanical fishing rod. Of all the possessions that I inherited, the starfisher was dad's truest legacy. I picked up where he left off, expanding on his star smuggling business as he would've wanted. All I had to do was find the people who'd wished on stars when they were children and offer them one of two options: pay me to keep their star in the sky or pay me to fish it free. Most clients paid a hefty fee to let their star fall by natural means and make their wish come true. Others regretted their childhood wishes and wanted me to pluck them from the sky before they could be fulfilled. There was money to be made in either case. At least until the starfisher broke.

I need no map to reach the Sisterhood of Solace. The stories I've heard in Grauland are true. After a journey of three days north, I reach the base of their mountain, where a squat brick tavern greets me like the last remaining pumpkin in a patch. Beyond it, a dark road snakes up to the mountaintop. The Devil's Tail.

The publican greets me warmly; perhaps I am the first monk he's seen in a long time. But I decline his offer of a brew. I'm sure it's come from up there, from the mountain, from the Sisterhood. People say their beer makes princes cry.

People say their beer can do a lot of things.

I get my killer recipes from my Vietnamese mom, and my distrust of people from my Chinese dad. Maybe it's not healthy, but least it kept me out of the crypto craze.

"For the last time, Clarissa, this space is not cursed," Tanya says. "But it's the only affordable space in this overpriced town." Her words echo through the restaurant space, empty of furniture save for the built-in bar and hostess station.

Right outside the window, the copper statue Sherman Vanquishes the Squid gleams in the afternoon sun. Sam Sherman eyes the beast through his gun's crosshairs. The one-eyed Goliath squid looks up in fear, its beak vicious, with rotating hooks on the ends of its tentacles, scintillating rainbow skin, and twelve arms flailing.

Everybody said Black Shuck was a great big fearsome devil, but I wasn't so scared the night I met him in the woods. I'd only been dead for two hours, and I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to be afraid of some old black dog curled up crying in the bushes.

The sound of his whimpering cut right through my own tears. I wiped my drippy nose as best I could, sniffled once or twice more for good measure, and followed the noise until I saw the shape of him. His whimpering was how I knew he was a dog and not a monster. His burning red eyes when he looked up were how I knew he was Black Shuck. A demon's eyes, Bloody Roger Barnaby told me later, hot as hellfire: proof that Shuck had crawled up from below to haunt these woods. I don't know about that—sometimes I think Roger Barnaby doesn't know anything about anything—but he looked like he'd crawled out of the stories, at least.

Milly and I walked home from school to find Mom sitting on the porch with her suitcase on her lap. She turned away from us and shouted into the door, "They're here. Move it!"

Our older sister, Becky, slouched out in barely obedient teen anger, a beach tote on one shoulder and a plastic grocery bag in her other hand.

"Leave your schoolbooks," Mom said, standing. "Let's go."

Ewing taught her how to do it safely, with a red foil wrapper from one of those strawberry candies they gave out with your bill at every Chinese restaurant. "They're for good luck," he'd said, the first time they tried it. That, and something to do with electrical conductivity. That way you got unlimited minutes and the full spectrum of sensation, undiluted by the cranial filters they put in to stop people from spiraling out. Or, as Ewing put it, to stop people like them from having fun.

They'd been having a lot of fun, lately.

It is the stream that leads Gethin to the cove. At night it burbles in his dreams, foaming at the mouth and demanding he follow it. And so he obliges.

Seven miles he walks, with the stream as his guide. Seven miles in pitch dark, through field and forest, until he arrives at the coast at the cusp of dawn. Poised on the clifftop, Gethin peers down on a mercury-tinted bay while the stream cascades over the cliff, spewing its guts into the sea.

They would not bury her in consecrated ground. Her life was all the wrong forms of holy.

She walked barefoot through Beltane fields and knew all the herbs of the deep woods; her hands were the first touch infants knew in life, and those who had only the cold press on the eyelids of corpses, the swipe of water over supplicant brows, were jealous of that bloody strength.

No matter. Your beloved did not belong below stone or ringed by paltry yew.

It began at least six months before her end, though of course Rose-Ellen didn't know to frame it in such terms at that time. A little nudge out of her body and to the side, subtle at the start as such dire things often are. She searched for her symptoms and received imperfect terms Depersonalization, she googled, derealization. Her sensations both were and weren't as described. She was pretty sure it was something else, sharing some features with these known phenomena but ultimately something more.

She cleared her browser history, imagining someone taking those searches as clues to something, in the future. As though anyone would try to unravel the mystery of her life after the fact.