A Light at the End of the World | Short Story
A prequel to my dystopian science fiction novel set in a near-future America.
Note: Had to republish this because the original post was crashing Substack for some reason.
The dory drifted to shore on the lightly lapping crests of night-dark waves. At the bottom of the boat, a man lay dead, left hand stiff and lifeless on his chest. The Reader embedded in his arm remained dark. He had not turned it on at sea, even though a distress signal might have saved his life.
Ayami found him just before sunrise. She did not scream. She did not cry. She stared silently and without expression at the empty husk that had once housed the soul of her husband John. Her own soul attempted to detach from her body. She could feel it struggling, like a butterfly in a glue trap.
The dead man’s face had nothing of her husband in it. John’s broad face had brimmed with gentle amusement. The body in the boat looked like something crafted, stuffed, and coated with crepe paper. The man she loved had gone elsewhere. She looked out across the sea, searching for his spirit where the cold, gray waters of the Pacific met the shimmer of sunrise. If she could locate his soul along that glittering horizon, she would fling herself into the sea. She would swim out to meet him, and—
The baby kicked, and she snapped back to herself.
She looked in the other direction, around at the desolate, wind-raked island with its cross-bedded sandstone and red-bark madrone trees, suddenly afraid. It had been John’s idea to move to northern Cascadia and live in a decommissioned lighthouse on a deserted island. Out here, there was no society to impress, no technology to track their movements, log their conversations, and deny them access to things they needed based on their designated castes. With his Reader disconnected, there would be no updates to his Lifestream, nobody to know John had died. Nobody would know his wife was pregnant, or where they lived, or anything about them at all.
And, of course, that had largely been the point.
But now she had a problem.
She must take John’s body to town. He deserved a proper funeral. And she needed supplies besides. The practicality of motoring the boat across the straight with her husband’s corpse—a journey that would take hours—bothered her less than the thought of what she would say to the people in town when she arrived. They did not like her much, she knew. And they would like her less after this. John was the welcoming one, always so warm and helpful, offering to fix broken biomechanical parts for the people living out here on the edge of the world, even though they could only pay him a pittance. Yes, the people liked John. They needed someone like him. They did not need someone like her. For the few years they had lived out here, that had suited her fine. She had been happy on the island, relying on the cistern for water and sunlight for electricity, talking only to John.
She was not sure what she would do now.
One thing at a time, she supposed, the way she had always done things.
She pushed the boat off the shore and climbed in with the body that was no longer John.
The lights were blinding, the chatter of the guests a cacophony. Normally, when it was not so loud or the foyer so full of people, the glittering crystals in the chandeliers fascinated her. Now, there were too many lights. They blazed like a thousand little suns above fizzing champagne flutes held by throngs of strangers, ricocheting off the glasses, the mirrors on the walls, and the shiny shoes of the party guests, dazzling her wherever she looked.
Ayami squinted, covered her ears with her hands, and looked up at her mother.
“Stop that.”
The ice in her mother’s tone could crack steel. She took Ayami’s right hand, pulling it down from her ear, and dragged her four-year old daughter down the winding staircase, stiletto heels clicking on the white marble. Ayami stumbled, layers of pink tulle catching at her toes and scratching her thighs. She stared at the ground, tracing the veins of black and gold in the marble, trying not to trip.
“Eyes up, Ayami,” her mother seethed.
Ayami raised her eyes. People swelled toward them like a wave. The men wore the ruffled dress shirts and brocade waistcoats fashionable among the upper castes. The women wore dresses with structured bodices, cinched waists, decorative sleeves, and slim taffeta skirts. They came at Ayami in a mass, hip to hip, endless layers of shimmer and shine crowding around her.
“Such a pretty baby!”
“She has darling eyes!”
“What a beautiful dress!”
Ayami clutched at her mother’s skirt, the magenta fabric coarse and stiff in her hand, sliding off the underskirt, layers removed from her actual body. Her mother wasn’t looking at her. Her chin tilted away, shining eyes hard like onyx. She smiled as she took in each exclamation of admiration.
Between the shuffling feet and whirling skirts of the party guests, Ayami caught a glimpse of her older sister, Risa, long ribbons streaming from her dark hair as she bounced between their father and the party guests, all smiles and grace and effortless charm. And then the ranks closed in, blocking Ayami’s view of anything except skirts and pants and grasping hands.
Strange, rough fingers reached out to pinch her cheeks and ruffle her hair, causing the barrettes to snag and pull the delicate strands.
She began to wail.
“Excuse me,” her mother said, fingers rising to press diffidently against the hollow of her throat. “I’ll settle her. One moment.”
Ayami felt her mother’s hand close around her upper arm. She was half-carried, half-dragged back up the stairs. Ayami found herself calming in the relative quiet of her room, the panic ebbing away once surrounded by silent, familiar things. She looked at her pictures on the wall, finger paint smears of all the colors she liked best lined up in a row. Tears stopped leaking from her eyes but clung to her lashes in great, glistening drops.
Her mother shook Ayami off her arm and flung her to the ground.
“Don’t you ever embarrass me like that again!” she hissed. “Stay here, you worthless mute!”
She turned, slim shoulders hunched in fury, and did not look back.
Ayami heard the door lock. She sank down to the floor, tulle skirts billowing up around her ears like a flower closing in the dark.
Ayami arrived in town before midday, the sun beating down on her head and suntanned arms as she guided the boat to the dock. She shut off the motor and tied the rope to one of the cleats.
Birdie ran up the dock to meet her. She was in her sixties, dark face framed by steel gray dreadlocks. She wore a loose dress over a buxom figure that had plumped and sagged with age, but which Ayami had heard her boast to have been fit and toned in a wild, reckless youth. These days she spent much of her time in a rocking chair under the awning of the bait and tackle store she ran, staring out at sea with her two-toned eyes, one brown and the other bright violet. She often said one eye saw the present and the other the future. Although the violet eye was mechanical, Ayami knew it was not really precognitive, confirmed by the distress on Birdie’s face at the sight of John’s body in the boat, and the panicked question that leaped from her mouth like a fish.
“What happened to John?”
Ayami clambered out of the boat and onto the dock. She did not struggle with this. She wore wide legged workman’s trousers and a sleeveless cotton-knit top, and she knew her way around the sea. But she didn’t expect Birdie to pull her into a hug as soon as she straightened. She did not expect that at all. At first, she recoiled from the unsolicited touch, but the closeness of the other woman battered down something she had been barely holding up, and she collapsed against Birdie in a fit of tears.
“He died,” she gasped, the words falling from her lips like stones. “John’s dead.”
Birdie held her as she sank to her knees on the wooden slats. Before now, Ayami would not have pegged old Birdie for the comforting sort, despite being a leader in the town. She had a reputation for being as tough as gnarled driftwood. Unlike most of the residents in the community, Birdie hadn’t been exiled to these parts. At least, she claimed she had not. She had been a journalist years ago, paid to write news stories for the Reader Network, but chaffed under the censorship of the Administrators. Chasing rumors, she had struck out for the outer edges of America to see what they were like and found she liked it much more than she had been led to expect—enough to abandon her third caste privileges and set up shop on the sea selling fishing equipment, sundries, and a little community newspaper she wrote, printed, and distributed herself.
“But what happened?” Birdie asked, pushing Ayami’s hair out of her eyes, an intimate gesture that might have bothered Ayami in other circumstances. “How’d John just up and die like that? I saw him two weeks ago, looking fit and fine.”
“I think it was his heart,” Ayami replied.
John had been born with a weak heart. As a child, he had been in and out of hospitals, getting operation after operation, fitted with AI-enabled biotechnology to modulate genetic defects, and eventually a heart transplant. He claimed to be as fit as any other person after recovering from surgery, but Ayami knew that stretched the truth. While generally able-bodied, John was supposed to receive ongoing post-operative care and subjected to treatments, medications, and operations for the rest of his life.
But John hadn’t wanted to live like that. He’d wanted to come out here, far away from society, and not live “life in a fishbowl”, as he put it, subject to the judgements and decisions of others, even if it shortened his life. He claimed his parents had coerced him to get the heart transplant in the first place, when he was still a teenager under their care and control, and that he felt guilty for potentially stealing the heart of a healthy, fifth caste dissident whose life had been sacrificed to prolong his own. He didn’t know if this was true. Recipients of viable hearts were not told where they came from, but an ugly rumor persisted that it was done sometimes.
Ayami begged him not to push himself. A time or two, she had seen him get suddenly winded after exercise that normally did not faze him. He told her it was nothing. She understood why he didn’t want to go to a hospital, that he had even more compelling reasons than she did for staying off the Reader Network. But she had wanted him to be careful. She had not wanted him to take the boat anywhere alone. He had insisted.
“Stay home,” he told her. “You’ll need to when the baby comes. Use the time to paint. I feel fine.”
He would return by dinner, he assured her. But he didn’t. She ate alone. When night fell, she hoped he had merely encountered some obstacle that necessitated staying in town overnight. Sometimes, someone needed a repair, and he always obliged, even if the work would take hours.
That evening, she tried to paint. She unstopped a few jars and looked at the liquid glistening in the darkness. She chose gray, slate blue, and a deep, troubling purple, like the storms that sometimes shattered against the island, drenching the lighthouse in torrents of rain. But the skies were clear that day. It was her heart upon which a shadow had fallen.
By morning, she knew something had happened. She had spent most of the night awake, the canvas blank, the jars put away in the end. Finding John dead in the boat did not surprise her, but it smote her so thoroughly, she couldn’t feel anything. A shattered soul did not feel pain.
She looked into Birdie’s eyes, the brown one kind and comforting, the other calculating. “What am I going to do?”
Birdie gripped her shoulders. “You’re gonna live,” she said with a fierceness that jolted Ayami to her core. “That’s what we do here. When we lose what we love, when they’ve taken everything away from us, we continue to live. That’s what you’ll do too. Because you’re one of us. Do you hear me? I knew you it from the moment I first saw you.”
The tears that spilled down Ayami’s cheeks were a mangle of grief, relief, and joy.
Ayami was born a pretty baby, but the shine rubbed off quickly. She grew stocky and strong rather than slim and delicate. While blessed with a pretty face, it was not as expressive as her sister’s. She demanded too much attention, never seemed to listen, and cried too much. She rarely spoke.
Her parents concluded she lacked intelligence.
In her thirties, single and without prospects, she was a burden.
Ayami knew—because an Administrator had told her—that if she had been born into the third caste instead of the second, she would have been knocked down to the fourth and relegated to a life of service. Her parents did not know what to do with her. The obvious solution was marriage, seeing as intelligence was unnecessary for a wife and mother, but her parents despaired of her ever marrying. Ayami could just not seem to attract the interest of any suitors, so much so that her parents put little effort into introductions. Her teenage years came and went without a single date. Her twenties slipped away without any promising attachments, and with them the best years for childbearing. Her sister Risa—who had married into the first caste and already had two children—remarked that Ayami did not even have any friends, a detail that seemed to have slipped the notice of her parents.
And now it was too late. She was too old. No one would want her.
“But I don’t know if I even want to get married,” she told her mother. “I want to paint.”
They were in the solarium. Ayami’s mother had just watered her yucca shrubs and was examining the hibiscus and caladium for signs of sun scorching. They had servants to do these things, but Ayami’s mother liked tending to her plants herself. She smiled fondly as she gently turned the delicate leaves of the caladium, examining the blushing pink hues in the sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Don’t be silly,” her mother said, not looking at Ayami, who lingered in the shadows by the door. “There’s no living to be made from art these days. Machines can do all that so much faster and more precisely.”
Ayami said nothing. It was true. Automated art had almost entirely replaced art made by human hands, at least commercially. If you wanted a painting for your dining hall, you sent the dimensions to a studio along with a description of what you wanted. While professionals trained in AI-generated art managed the order, a machine painted the approved spec in a flawless rendering. Ayami noted her mother did not mention the affordability of automated art compared to paintings that predated the Climate Wars. The upper castes still paid handsomely for old art that had been valuable in the past. What her mother really meant was that the life of an artist was unnecessary and unbecoming. It was fine as a hobby, but if Ayami entered a profession, it would shame the family simply by being work.
Besides which, creativity was discouraged—and had been since the dismantling of universities, publishing centers, and the privatization of the internet. Information, communication, and socialization had all been connected, streamlined, and sanitized through the Reader Network. Homogenous values were conferred upon the public. The content uploaded to individual Lifestreams was monitored and edited to prevent discord. There was no need to worry about accumulating knowledge and skills outside the career choices assigned to you—if you were third caste and approved to work anyway—as ascension was only possible through marriage or arbitration by the Administrator Board. Merit was acknowledged to be mostly inherited. The caste system funneled people where they belonged. Ayami was second caste, the noble daughter of wealthy parents. Her job was to marry well.
She was just a failure.
Ayami rubbed the Reader embedded in her left arm—her ever-present access to information, news, and communication. It also tracked her vitals, location, and moods. Everyone in her generation had one, though embedding them was starting to fall out of favor amongst younger children in the upper castes. After years of failing to build human connections through social channels, Ayami mostly kept the screen locked on a close approximation of her skin color, all notifications muted.
“Don’t argue with me, Ayami,” her mother said, though Ayami hadn’t said a word. “You know I’m always right.”
The finality in her tone withered Ayami’s resolve. She withdrew without argument. But she decided to go to the park and paint anyway. It was the one thing she enjoyed, and at least she wouldn’t have to wear a dress. Her mother didn’t want her fine clothes ruined.
Ayami often painted in the same spot, on the white stone bridge that arched over the canal. From the center of the bridge, she had an unobstructed view of the park. She liked that the water looked different every day, depending on the light. She brought a portable easel and art supplies in a carrying case that she slung over her back. It was a heavy load, but she managed.
She had set up the canvas and finished the background and the canal and was working on dark blobs that she planned to turn into geese when a man pulled up behind her on a bicycle and stopped to admire her work.
“That’s lovely,” he said.
Ayami paused, pulling her brush away from the canvas, and turned to look at him.
He had a broad face, bright blue eyes, and wore black-rimmed glasses. His brown hair was thinning and his pale skin had faint freckles. She found him pleasant to look at. He smiled at her work, and then smiled at her. “I’m John,” he said, reaching out a hand in greeting.
Ayami stared at it, unsure what to do.
“I’ve seen you here before,” John continued. He put his hand back on the handlebar of his bike when she didn’t put her brush down to shake it. “You paint here a lot. Are any of your paintings for sale? I’d love to have one.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“May I ask your name?”
“Ayami.”
“My name’s John. John Arden. Do you mind if I watch you paint, Ayami?”
The sound of her name said with such warmth caused a little shiver to run down her spine. She didn’t object. Half standing, half sitting on his bike, John watched her paint. He watched her paint for over an hour, occasionally asking her questions, and telling her about himself. He was third caste, worked at a biotech lab nearby, and loved to build things in his backyard. His small house didn’t have much décor, and he’d been thinking about getting some paintings, but he didn’t know much about art, only that he found the precision of the automated art that hung in the lobby of his workplace to be a little stale. What he liked about her paintings were the mistakes she made, and how she corrected them or incorporated them in inventive ways. He found it fascinating.
He sounded so interested, she found herself explaining what she did, and why she did it, until her voice grew hoarse, and she had to stop to catch her breath. Once she had fallen silent, she didn’t know how to start again. When she finished her painting, they had both been silent for a while. She put her brushes and paints away, flushing with embarrassment. She could not bring herself to meet John’s eyes.
The sun was setting, enveloping the two of them in a pink-gold radiance. John remarked that there was a little shop around the corner that sold delicious sandwiches. He asked if he could buy her dinner.
She accepted.
No one could believe that Ayami wanted to return to the island after John’s funeral, that she thought she could live in a renovated lighthouse alone with a baby. Birdie tried to talk her out of it, but Ayami insisted. Her home was on the island. She would have her baby at home, in the beautiful, quiet paradise that she and John had built together. She would not go to a hospital where her baby would be chipped into a caste with nanotechnology that would dissolve into his blood stream, leaving markers that would brand him forever.
Birdie relented.
Ayami’s resolve led to a curious development. The town organized to support her. A small water tank was installed on the cliffside where passing fishing boats could refill it from their tanks using a hose so she wouldn’t have to rely solely on the cistern. People came to visit her, bringing oil and spices, flour and cheese, candles and clothing, and other good things for which she traded fish, vegetables, artwork, and the paints she made herself using a mortar and pestle with plants, minerals, and shells she found on the island.
Her baby was born in early September—a healthy boy she named Ryo.
They built a life by the sea.
Ryo loved birds and clouds and shiny rocks and the sound of water in all its forms—the ocean waves, the patter of rain, the splash of puddles. When he was small, Ayami carried him around with her in a sling. When he was old enough to walk, she taught him the names of everything on the island, pointing and repeating. She showed him everything his father had built to ensure their survival and how they worked—the solar panels and the generator they powered, the water from the cistern which they now used for washing, how the vegetable garden was irrigated, where she had set traps for crabs and fish, and how to gather eggs from the hens in the henhouse.
As a baby, Ryo regarded her with dark, solemn eyes, saying little but understanding much. By the time he turned four, he spoke little more than she had at his age, but he assisted around the house with enthusiasm. He could make his own bed, water the plants, feed the chickens, collect driftwood and shells, cook simple meals, and put things away in places he could reach.
Everything Ryo did gave her joy. When she looked at him, her heart swelled with such affection, she felt it would burst. Sometimes in those moments, memories of her own childhood came to her in jagged flashes, like pieces ripped from a tapestry. She couldn’t imagine scorning Ryo for being silly or mocking him for not responding when asked a question, or snapping at him for wanting to be held when it was inconvenient, as her own mother had done.
The contrast between how she felt when she looked at Ryo and how she remembered feeling as the object of her mother’s subtle contempt left no doubts.
She did not miss her family.
She did miss John.
Ayami’s parents reacted with less enthusiasm than Ayami anticipated when she announced her engagement. They showed little interest in John. They did not ask how he and Ayami met, how John proposed, what they loved about each other, or how they wanted to live their lives. When Ayami tried to tell her parents about her ideas for the wedding, her father walked out of the room. Her mother cut her off.
“As the parents of a girl, your wedding is an event we look forward to our whole lives,” she said, seeming astonished that Ayami would have an opinion on the matter. “We’ll take care of everything. You just show up.”
Over the next few weeks, Ayami’s mother drew up a guest list of three hundred—extended family and a smattering of John’s relatives, but mostly esteemed acquaintances from notable, local families she wanted to impress. She had custom letterpress invitations designed on soft white cotton stationery. She rented a dance hall, booked a French caterer that exclusively served upper caste soirees, and commissioned for herself an extravagant ballgown of indigo and silver from a famous designer. Ayami was asked only what color she wanted for the decorative accents and bridesmaid dresses—to be worn by the daughters of her mother’s friends that Ayami did not even know. When she said gray, her mother changed it to blue. “Power blue,” she said. “Gray is too somber for a wedding, and you’ve never looked good in it.”
“Let’s elope,” Ayami said to John that evening. They were at his house, entwined together in his bed. “You were right. I was wrong to think being a bride would change anything. This party isn’t to celebrate us.”
John was quiet. For a moment, she was afraid he would reject the idea and force her to go through with the wedding her mother wanted since it was already being planned, even though she knew John had preferred a private ceremony from the beginning.
“What is it?” Ayami asked him when he didn’t respond. “What’s wrong?” Dread filled her. “Is it my parents? Are you having second thoughts about marrying me because of them?”
In answer, he pulled her closer to him by the hip and kissed her hair. “It’s not your parents,” he whispered into her ear. “It’s mine. There’s something I have to tell you. I’ve been trying to figure out how.”
He muted the sound receiver on his Reader and covered the screen with his sleeve.
Ayami’s heart began to race.
“Your parents?” she asked, baffled by this turn.
She had met John’s parents. They were quiet, third-caste people who lived in a modest rambler out in the country. She had thought they liked her, but she might be mistaken. Many people she had thought her friends in the past turned out to be merely tolerating her out of politeness. It had taken her years to believe that John truly loved her, so much so that she had turned him down when he first proposed, thinking it a cruel joke. But John did love her.
“It’s not you,” John assured her, sensitive to her feelings of rejection. “My parents are… not sympathetic to the Administrators. They don’t like the caste system, or the Whitehall dynasty, or any of the changes since the Climate Wars.”
“You don’t either,” Ayami said. “We’ve talked about it. The Reader Network—”
“Yes, but it’s more than that,” John said. “It’s not just philosophical. They’re… Ayami, my parents are rebels.”
Ayami didn’t know what to say. Rebels? Actual, active, treasonous rebels?
John did not know the details, but he tried to explain. He had learned of it by accident, but he had evidence that his parents were either funding rebel activities, spying for rebel operations, or both. While his parents liked Ayami, they hated the upper castes. They wanted a revolution. They were willing to take the risk of being lowered to fifth caste if they were caught, which meant exile, imprisonment, indentured servitude, or even death.
“We can’t stay here,” John told her. “I’ve been thinking about it. My parents will try to take advantage of your family’s connections. We’ll get caught up in it. I have some property out west. It needs some work, but…”
It took her awhile to fully understand. John wanted to flee the country. He had purchased a decommissioned lighthouse at the outer edges of what used to be the United States, which had been only lightly populated even before the ecological disasters and bombings reshaped the waterways in northern Cascadia. They would have to fix it up for habitation, but that prospect excited him.
John was an engineer. Because of his heart condition, he had chosen to specialize in biomechanical engineering, but while he found his education interesting, his experience in the workforce sickened him. It was one thing to design a mechanical arm for a person who lost their natural one in an accident. It was something else to chop off a healthy limb and replace it with a mechanical appendage because upper caste donors wanted to fund research to create powerful, immortal bodies but didn’t want to experiment on themselves.
He had contemplated moving far away before he even met Ayami. Now he wanted more than anything to live free from the technology that governed every moment of their lives. He would design systems to ensure their comfort. He had thought it all out. He showed her sketches of the things he wanted to build and talked about what their future would be like. Ayami would paint beautiful pictures like she had that day in the park when they first met, inspired by light and water and air. Their children would build castles in the sand and swim in the sea. They would still need supplies, so they would live near a community where they could buy or trade for things they could not cultivate, as long as it wasn’t a place where people depended on Readers for commerce and communication.
Because he wanted to shut his off—forever.
“We can do it,” he told her. “I know we can. It will be difficult, but—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. Her expression might have been hard to read while he explained, but her heart soared. “Yes,” she repeated, animating her face.
John beamed at her. She smiled back, tears in her eyes.
If she could, she would have ripped her Reader out of her arm right then. But Readers were difficult to remove, even for biomechanical engineers, as doing so exposed the bone and caused other complications. Since a plate of some kind would need to replace the hardware, it made more economical sense to just disconnect them.
And that was what they did.
They would be safe, she thought, as long as no one found out where they had gone.
Birdie spotted the helicopter from the dock. Its circling blades beat the air with a strong mechanical thrum, waking up the whole neighborhood. People came pouring out of their shanty homes to stare up at the thing, moving low and slow over the sea, like a great, ponderous, black-bellied bird.
It was heading toward the island.
“Oh no,” she gasped. “No. No. No.”
She’d seen helicopters like that before, but not for a long, long time. They were used by the military for air assault and tactical transport. She couldn’t imagine what the brass wanted with a poor widow living on an island at the edge of the world. John had revealed enough about Ayami’s family for Birdie to understand why they had wanted to come here, but most folk in these parts were fourth or fifth caste. A second-caste woman fleeing to the outer reaches of America against the wishes of her family might cause a stir, maybe puncture a few inflated egos. Did that explain something like this? Maybe. But how could they know where she had gone?
Her violet eye remembered. She could never forget anything it saw. Right now, she could see with perfect clarity the obituary Ayami had asked her to write for John five years ago. She’d done it without thinking, publishing it in her community newsletter. The circulation was only a few hundred people, just local folk, but what if, over time—
Though her old bones protested, she forced them into action with an agility she had not called upon in decades. Her neighbor Taylor had a fishing boat. It wasn’t the fastest ship, but it could hit thirty knots in good weather and should get them to the island in twenty or thirty minutes. She barely needed to explain. He had seen the helicopter too.
Fortunately, conditions were favorable, with bright blue skies and a calm sea. Birdie stood at the bow, wind, salt, and sea water throwing tiny spikes into her face as the boat ate up the distance between the town and the island.
“Over there,” she said to Taylor, pointing the way around the jagged rock formations to the island’s only inlet. The cove had no dock, just a half-moon beach of gray pebbles and sea-washed stones, but she knew where there was an old post sticking out of a bluff where a rope could be tied if you were nimble enough to clamber up some rocks.
Birdie surprised herself—and Taylor—with her strength. Aging muscles remembered days when she had leapt fences and sped across fields faster than a gazelle. She did not ask Taylor to come with her. The man had an anxious partner and a daughter prone to epileptic fits. Birdie didn’t know what she would find on the island, but she knew it would not be good. If there was a risk, an old woman with sagging arms had more chance than most of not looking like threat enough to shoot on sight.
The lighthouse was a short hike through trees along a rocky trail. She’d been here often enough that the scenery blurred around her. The air had a scent that she recognized and did not like—the acrid smell of kerosine and gunpowder.
Birdie emerged from the trees to see the lighthouse perched above the cliffs at the far end of the field. The beacon in the lantern room under the cupola didn’t work anymore, but the remote home John had built for his family with such thoughtful tenderness and love radiated a different kind of light. The sight of it caused her heart to flutter. She should have warned him, warned them both. No place was safe, not if the Administrators thought you were trouble, not even way out here.
The helicopter blocked her way to the lighthouse, its blades beginning to turn.
“Stop!” she cried, running along the path cutting through the long yellow grasses. She could see men in military gear, rifles in their hands, eyes shaded by goggles, masks covering the rest of their faces. She coughed as the helicopter blades picked up speed, blowing smoke into her eyes. “Wait!”
Blocking half her face with one arm, she opened her violet eye wide, staring straight into the dust to capture the scene. Two men were hoisting a woman into the helicopter through the open side doors. Ayami hung limp between the men, head lolling on her neck. Her long black hair slipped off her face. Birdie cried out when she saw the bullet wound in her forehead, right between the eyes.
“Why?” she screamed into the wind. “She didn’t do anything but live free!”
Where was the boy? Where was little Ryo?
She saw him being carried out of the lighthouse by a man in a black tactical military vest, a gun holstered at his hip. The boy writhed as he was passed to another soldier in the helicopter. He kicked and screamed but the vibrating thrum of the helicopter blades swallowed his cries. The soldier who carried him out of the lighthouse jumped up into the helicopter behind him.
And then they were taking off, the whirling of the blades drowning out all sound as the helicopter lifted off the ground and into the air. The soldiers must have seen Birdie come up the path, but they did not stop for her. They didn’t so much as look at her.
Birdie shrank where she stood, her old, wrinkled hands tightening into fists. She could do nothing but shake them like a child, screaming into the wind until her throat became hoarse. Tears leaked from her real eye. Her other eye continued to record the helicopter pulling away.
When it was gone from view, Birdie tottered the rest of the way to the lighthouse on trembling legs. She observed the remains of the life that John and Ayami had built together. The inside of the square cottage was as quaint as she remembered from the last time she had come here, clean and bright with simple furniture and shelving John had built himself. There was a living room with an attached kitchen, a laundry room and a bathroom in the main living area, all with modern finishings that John had scrapped from trash yards and refurbished.
She glanced into the primary bedroom, and then into the child’s room, before coming at last to Ayami’s workroom. Face sagging in anticipation, she pushed open the door.
Blood stained the white stone floor, dark as cherry sauce, pooling in the center of the room. Her violet eye zoomed in on the imprint of military boots visible in the smears.
Then she saw the paintings. Dozens of them littered the room where Ayami had fallen. They depicted sweeping seascapes, the madrone trees overhanging the cliffs, and shorebirds and seals lazing on the bluffs—all the natural scenes from Ayami’s life on the outside. Her use of light stopped the breath. It gave her paintings an ethereal, airy quality that was also somehow warm and real. She painted other things too: John’s irrigation system and the vegetable garden, the cistern they used to capture rainwater, the kitchen with its white painted cabinets and pale wood countertops. She painted Ryo’s crib, the one that Birdie had given Ayami. She had painted portraits of John too, many portraits of John, and of her baby, but only one of herself.
Birdie approached the portrait, blinking tears from her real eye. The portrait showed a beautiful woman, her face illuminated by a light that seemed to come from within, her smile hinting that she longed for nothing more than the simple pleasures she shared with her chosen family during the short time they been allowed to be live happy and free.
Birdie sank down to the floorboards to weep.
A week later, an obituary was published on the Reader Network.
Birdie read it through a long unused encrypted connection, acid rising in her throat. It had been penned by Ayami’s mother. It misspelled Ayami’s last name, John’s family name, as Ardin instead of Arden. It referred to Ayami as a troubled girl born with intellectual deficiencies who showed poor judgment. It implied that she had run away with a man of questionable moral character and died in a tragic accident. It named her parents and sister as survivors.
No mention was made of Ryo.
Birdie had enough fieldwork under her belt to make some assumptions. Ayami’s family had likely put out feelers for their errant daughter, offended that she would dare to live outside their control. They may have colluded with the Administrators with the intention of having her forcibly brought home. Unfortunately, Administrators didn’t take much care in situations like this, not when the target was a dissident. Ayami had likely been shot for resisting arrest, or simply for being found on the outside.
But why didn’t the obituary mention the child? Had the girl’s birth family rejected him, perhaps out of spite, or because the boy’s father was third caste, or out of horror for how things had turned out? Possibly. Or someone else wanted him. Orphans were of interest to Administrators. They made fine lab rats. And then there were John’s parents. If what John had told her was true, they were connected to rebels, though she doubted the right ones. They might have drawn the wrong attention, and that attention could have ensnared John and Ayami no matter how far they fled.
Birdie’s violet eye connected to her Lifestream, lighting up old contacts for the first time in decades. Names she hadn’t seen since her youth brought a mixture of feelings, some of them pleasant, others a wary respect. She didn’t know if most of her old acquaintances were in a position to be provocative these days, but she knew at least one who could get things done, if something needed doing.
“I’ve got a new story for you,” she thought. The chip in her brain formed a transcription of her thoughts that her mechanical eye edited in real time. She had forgotten how cool that was, though it didn’t make up for the rest of it. “Bet you never thought to hear me say that again.”
She sent an encrypted packet of the video recording, a memory she could never forget now, along with a description of what she had seen as well as details about the boy’s parents—everything she’d been able to verify since John bought the deed of the lighthouse from her years ago and she’d agreed to let him join the community.
“They looked like Administrator thugs to me,” she said. “It was their gear anyway. But the real interesting bit is the boy. He isn’t in the system. He’s got no caste chip, no one at all to care about what happens to him, except us battered and banished folks, persona non grata. I don’t think he belongs in the hands of the Administrators, and I need someone to make sure that’s not where he ends up. He means something to me, as did his mother and father, I don’t mind saying.”
She waited.
A response blipped on her screen.
When can we meet?
About the Author: Amy M. Stewart is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in the Pacific Northwest. On Substack, she shares stories, articles, and updates on her creative endeavors. She also has a YouTube review channel and a LinkedIn for thought leadership on the future of work.
I enjoyed it. Good world building with such a short word count.
Characters I was interested in, and want to know more about.
Mild confusion at the beginning when I didn't grok Ayami's flashback, but not a big deal.
I even learned a new word, which I may or may not remember going forward, as a fancy word for a particular type of cloth is not important to my vocabulary.