By the time my sight had returned, several things had become clear to me. Firstly, my daughter’s safety was paramount to me, and that safety was best served by keeping her away from both the pit master and myself. Secondly, the pit master would be on our trail by dusk, if not sooner. Clearly he would be as impaired as I in the light of day, but I knew well enough from months in his employ that his other senses more than made up the lack. He was a man — a thing — of power and influence, the best course was to get out of the city and out of the empire as quickly as possible. Aside from two rats and some numerous insects, I had heard not a sound from the house above in all the minutes it had taken me to plan our immediate action. The first thing, then, was to avail ourselves of my absent friend’s hospitality to clean the blood from our bodies, swaddle my daughter, and wrap my eyes against the light. This done, we stepped once more into the blinding day.

It was dark when I awoke. The side of my face that was pressed into the ground felt wet, though with the ferrous smell of a recent detonation heavy in the air it was hard to tell whether that wetness was water or blood. The relatively small exertion of pushing myself into a sitting position sent a shooting pain through my arm that almost caused me to black out again. My face burned as it moved through the air. Blood, then.

The darkness was absolute. There were no dim silhouettes to be picked out, just the constant kaleidoscopic flicker of randomly firing neurons behind my eyelids. I stood slowly, pawing the air over my head defensively in deference to the oppressive feeing of weight in the darkness above me. My legs held my weight without complaint, though I still patted them gingerly through what felt like jeans to be sure they were up to the task. There was a lump in each hip pocket. The right, a leather rectangle. Wallet maybe. The left, hard plastic. A phone? I fumbled the catch open and it spilled insipid blue light into the surrounding air. The floor was hard-packed dirt, the walls and ceiling rock, bolted and reinforced. From where I stood, three tunnels ran in a tee out of the circle of light. The phone beeped three times, feebly, then died, leaving me in the dark once more.

Had I been sired millennia later, I might have checked my headlong flight into the supposed oblivion of sunlight, but all I had heard of vampires were those ghost stories of things that fed on men in the dark that have followed us from plain to cave to hut to house to skyscraper. At that point I had not even a name for myself. Even in my flight I realised this lack, realised that I was fleeing from the one creature that knew what I now was. But I fled still, in my fury preferring ignorance to any enlightenment garnered from that fiend. In time these delusions of morality and distinction left me; such things are hard to keep in the knowledge that one is as fiendish as any other.

In the bald light of day, wild in my fury, chin caked with dried blood, bleeding baby girl under my arm, I must have looked a horror loosed from Hades. Certainly there were screams. Footsteps fled from my passage. I saw none of it. I was blind from the moment the sun hit my eyes. Not the blindness of midnight, soft and almost comforting, but the blindness of cold steel thrust through the eyesocket, grating on bone with its passage. I ran regardless, bouncing off beggars, fruit stalls and walls of stone. With ears and nose and hands I found my way to a back alley and an empty cellar. The cellar of an old colleague, gone for months on the trade routes at this time of year. There, still blind, I sat in the dirt to take stock. My daughter began to cry.

Down at the base of the sea-cliffs, more than half submerged at high tide, was the dark mouth of a cave. It was hidden around a kick in the rock, so that sunlight never penetrated more than a few scant meters, and impossible to see unless you were standing right in front of it. A strange heat and the smell of decay emanated from the opening, dissipating quickly in the sea air. It was the kind of place the locals of a town with a less intelligent populous might have called haunted. None living in the town had been into that darkness beyond an arm’s reach of the sunlight, but they all felt with an unspoken concert that it was the kind of place they would not like their children going on a dare. So it was not called haunted. It was not much spoken of at all, and were the things that crawled and dripped deep in the darkness capable of knowing or understanding this, it would have pleased them.

“Marcus Avitus,” the pit master bared his teeth. “You are reborn!”
“I am destroyed. By your hand.”
“And so? Your debt brought you to me, and in turn I have handed you the most marvelous destruction ever to befall a man. Show some gratitude!”
“And what of my wife? My daughter? Do you bring her to me as a gesture of good faith, or as a meal?”
“She is… insurance. I have invested much in your training and transformation. You young are so full of vitriol and folly and unrestrained emotion. It would be foolish to risk everything on the whim of your impotent fury.”
All through this talk I had been sizing up the monster that stood before me. My gladiator’s eye saw more than ever it had on the floor of the arena. His strength I gauged from the way he held my daughter, his speed from the fractions of a second it took his eyes to register emotion at my words and his hands to adjust to the squirming of my baby girl. I saw an opportunity presenting itself and, calmly and thoroughly, ran through the options and implications in the time it took him to speak.
“My mortal eyes had not seen how complacent power has made you,” I snarled, “for my fury is anything but impotent!”
Bald surprise showed on his face for only an instant, but in that time I had torn my daughter from his grip. Too roughly, and leaving chunks of skin under his fingernails, but alive and safer perhaps with me than with him. I was out the door before her heart beat next, and halfway down the corridor before the next. The pit master gave chase, but he had invested much in the illusion of his mortality, and I had little left to lose. I knocked aside servants and gladiators alike, finding my bearings quickly as I ran, and soon enough was shouldering aside a heavy oaken door to burst onto the busy sunlit street beyond.

In the gently pulsing blue glow of standby lights, the forest was sprouting new growth. The bulbous mushroom heads of hubs formed fairy rings in the matted tangle of the forest floor. Thick bundles of cables were pushing free of the undergrowth to twine around heavy trunks in search of an unclaimed access port. Seedling plugs split and branched in twos and fours. Here and there a seven segment display blinking eights into the dimness, or a speaker whispering a gentle hush of line level noise.

Through this all she stalked, interfaces for dozens of protocols, esoteric and universal, old and new, cascading off her shoulders and down her naked back, searching for a place to connect.

My growing rage was stalled by the sound of approaching footsteps. I noticed with some interest that the emotion had been stored away — compartmentalised — leashed and ready to be recalled at a moment’s notice. My mind was now taken with curiosity at the richness of tone and detail my new ears picked from this sound that I was fair certain I would not have heard at all with my old ears. There was more there, too. Information that my brain did not yet know how to process, but would learn with practice. And quickly. The sound of breathing joined the cadence, staccato, shallow and frightened. And a heartbeat, small and quick like a bird’s, but not weak. A new sound, metal on metal, key in lock, and the door sprang open. There stood the pit master, thick and wiry and, to my new eyes, clearly inhuman. In his arms, my little girl. The rage within barked and snarled, but I saw his hand at her throat and I held fast to its leash.

Bookfest comes but twice a year.

Hart’s workshop was a small place set a block back from the city’s edge. Parts small and large scattered the benches lining the walls; the only clear flat surface was the table beneath the window where Hart sat working on the turbine of a sensor platform.
“These the plans?” Rebbecca asked, examining the blueprints tacked to a corkboard by the door.
“That’s them. Still think you’re crazy.”
“You know as well as I that it’s necessary.”
“I surely do, Becky. Wasn’t an insult.”
Rebbecca smiled. “I’m going before the council tomorrow. I’ll need you there, if you can spare the time.”

Scritch, scritch.

The rat eyed them from atop an upturned bathtub. Its whiskers looked suspiciously like piano wire, and tinkled slightly when it wrinkled its nose to gnaw at the nickle clutched in its paws.
“I guess there’s life here after all,” said Peter. Startled by his voice, a flock of something with wings beaten from soda cans flapped lumberously away behind a shipping container.
“Of a sort,” said the rat. Alice stifled a giggle.
“Do you know, I wonder,” asked Peter, “if there is any place interesting around here?”
“There’s an alley over yonder,” the rat twitched its nose. “Back of a bar. Some good scraps there.”
“No, not an island,” says Alice. “What about in the junkyard?”
“There’s nothing in the junkyard. It’s all more of the same, isn’t it?”
They turned to leave.
“Except for the church, of course.”

A flutter of metal rang out — one of the soda can birds back to make a meal of the rat. With a scritch scritch it was away under a pile of shopping carts.