Drawn by Light
by CJ Erick
Transformation. The idea feels dangerous, even for someone like me, who was born from a cocoon.
It started with the missing girl. How does one missing girl change my whole damn world?
I was walking into the New World Jazz Yard during happy hour just as the comedian was finishing his set. The world’s first joke was probably written in Egyptian hieroglyphs and started out, “A cop walks into a bar…”
Everyone looked up at me, then away. An unsmiling woman in dark clothing and a trench coat marked me as a cop. None of their business.
I’m told the club hasn’t changed in the century since its founding in 1977. Same blood red carpet and wallpaper with gold accents. Same signed pictures of Hollywood’s finest and Chicago’s worst. Same dim incandescent bulbs, tobacco stains, damning secrets.
I like it. I find it inspirational. Spiritual. But that’s just me.
The comic was a short guy, human, with a small pointy head under a blue wig, dressed in a blue polymer jumpsuit. He was no higher than Level 5, with the look and sucrose voice of an infomercial regular. This bombardier was just punching out his last joke.
“So, the alien says, ‘Go commit adultery again and come back. Special this week – three absolutions for the price of one!’”
The crowd largely ignored him, clapping out of habit. As the comic ushered himself offstage, the live piano kicked in, and I eased toward the sound – you couldn’t see anything through the heavy smoke, a tan miasma that smelled like jungle flower and cannabis – down the carpeted steps to the sunken floor, and through the maze of low, round tables.
Nearly every table was full of patrons, Level 2 elites, some smoking weed or synth-opium, some tipping cocktails in the colors of insects. Most were human, but there were a few off-worlders with skin also in insect colors. All in flashy eveningwear, any of which would have cost me a full month’s worth of credits.
Something about my dress and manner must have screamed “cop,” because no one tried to touch my ass on my way by. The women are usually the worst. They think another woman won’t break their arm.
I’m a pretty standard 2050s engineered synth-baby. Designed for security or military service. Height a millimeter over six feet. Weight one-fifty. Good compromise between power and speed. Skin and hair dark, Argentinian, probably. Attractive but not pretty. They fucked up on the personality, though. By specification, I’m supposed to be cool and reserved. Somebody dumped something in the mix during incubation. It happens.
The pianist I sought was a Starnian, a nine-foot-tall skeleton-man built from a kid’s stick-and-cog erector set, covered in thin, hairless skin like gray parchment. He went by “Douglas Fairbanks.” I’d tried to learn to read the Starnian flashing light language once, like tiny LEDs bubbling beneath the surface of their ocular plates. Gave up after three hours. At least they had a real head on their bony shoulders, unlike some of the other musical ETs.
Doug spotted me when I broke from the crowd, or at least I thought he did, from the pause in his playing and the way his mouth slit clenched into a thin white line on his gray face. I settled in near the plasti-wood bar within ocular distance and waited for his set to end. His eight-fingered hands were nearly wide enough to cover the entire 88 keys and produced layers of gorgeous sound an entire human piano quartet would envy.
After he finished a heartful rendition of “The Gray Skies of Haundria,” he announced his break over the PA. He rose from the bench and, with a nod for me to follow, swept his piston arms through the milling crowd towards the back part of the bar, where he took the furthest plasteel stool and lit up a joint. I took the next seat. Natural ambient dance jazz filled the sonic void he’d left behind. He’d learned not to blow smoke in my face.
A lisping man’s voice issued from the little black translator box strapped to his throat.
“And I thought I wath … going to have a good night.” There was more than a bit of irony in his smile.
I said, “No reason why that should change.”
His pointy chin crinkled in a sneer. “I can th-ink of plenty of reasons, Miss Colson. You didn’t come in for the music, my friend.”
“Maybe I did. Maybe you don’t know why I’m here, Doug.”
He shook his head. “What do you want, Lieutenant?”
“Isn’t that nice, you remembered my rank. I’m looking for someone, Doug. Starnian. I think you know him.”
“Yeth. You’re looking for Prince Albert.”
“Gee, word gets around. Seen him?”
Doug tapped his ocular plate. “Theen him? How amusing, Lieutenant. You should audition for the stand-up job.”
“Three sex workers are missing, Doug, two young men and a woman. Prince was seen with all of them recently. I’ve got no time for jokes.”
One of the missing was a teen girl from my commune named Jennah. I liked her. I didn’t like her missing. I’d found her along with three other Level 6 teens at an underground sex house, run by one of my favorite aldermen. The others I knew—I’d dragged them from similar places before, and I figured they were lost causes. Jennah was new to the group. Still had a spark to her, a light that hadn’t been completely extinguished by the darkness of the city. She stopped me killing the two pimps and thanked me. I got her into a legit house and into the commune I grew up in, which cost me two months’ pay in bribes.
I wondered sometimes why I’d invested so much in Jennah. There were hundreds of exploited young people in the city, most of them Level 6 or unclassified. But there was something different about her, something I didn’t see in the others. She didn’t have that desperate look most of them had, that there was nothing left, nowhere to go. At least, not yet, and I was going to try to make sure she never got there.
Maybe it was because my synth-life had been set for me, no options. I didn’t see that look of desperation in my eyes. Was I incapable of feeling?
Doug’s mouth disappeared into lip wrinkles. I got the impression his plate was focused off in the distance. Life could be worse than Jennah had it. At least she had a level. Aliens like Doug had to earn them; another joke.
He said, “This city hath a disease, Miss Colson. Prince Albert has been a victim, not a vector.”
“Where is he?” I said.
He shook his dome again. “Have you heard of someone called ‘Luna Moth’?”
I shook my head.
“Theek her. She can help you. I cannot.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“In this case, the two are one and the thame. Good evening, Lieutenant Colson. It’s time for my next thet.”
I decided I wasn’t getting anything more from Doug, and the leverage I had on him had long ago expired. Really, I liked the guy, and it left a bad taste having to talk to him like that, but it’s an occupational hazard. So, I left the Yard and took the tube back to my condo. We were supposed to report to the ward house in person on Fridays, but three hours of waiting in tube lines to reach HQ for a thirty-minute grilling? The captain could give it to me over the ether.
When I reached full adult age of twenty-two and was allowed to leave the commune, I bought a tower condo that a Level 4 serviceperson normally couldn’t afford, a two-story mini-loft on the east face of the Tung Tower, sixtieth story. I have to supplement my shitty cop pay with piddly PI jobs to cover the mortgage, but my dayroom window overlooks the Loop, the wasteland that was once Chicago’s central city, now a cluster of broken architectural stumps set against the crystal waters of Lake Michigan.
I spent some time down there in my teens, to the dismay of my agency supervisors and a few dozen derelicts who gave me a hard time when I was there. But slumming in the Loop wasn’t all fun and games. Too many times, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out. I don’t go there much now.
But this was Friday, August, the sun sinking behind my building and residual heat pouring off the sidewalks like liquid stink, and I was happy to take the lift to my place and dial in to HQ. My place – a coagulation of pale gray boxes with exactly one painting on each wall, Danish-style wood furniture, and hand-sized security drones patrolling the place nonstop like humming octopuses. The sound puts me to sleep at night.
I dialed in and faked pleasantness for HQ’s circuit guardian – she would make your life hell if you didn’t pay proper obeisance – and she patched me into the office queue. Boss man Captain Steller made me wait a good twenty before he opened the facetalk, which was okay. His way of reminding me he outranked me, even though we were both Level 4’s. It gave me time to research this Luna Moth woman, but what was out there was sketchy and dosed and I didn’t want to go after her blind.
Steller’s pit bull face popped up on the comm-pad’s holograph display without a warning note. I’d hacked the pad and shut the camera off against rules, so he didn’t have a visual. His black eyebrows dug into the channel between his eyes like two caterpillars sliding down a twig to mate with the bushy one under his nose. I let him marinate a minute before I keyed the cam. I made sure I was smiling.
He growled and said, “I assume you have an excuse for calling in this afternoon. Again.”
“Yes, Captain,” I replied sweetly. “Went out to Elgin to confirm an eyewitness account this morning, and on the way back, the tube shut down because of a fault in the levitation system. I had to route via the Elk Grove hub and just made it back.”
“I won’t check the transfer videos or maintenance reports, Lieutenant, because if I found you were spinning the truth, I’d have to discipline you. And we both know where you stand in that area, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you find anything useful, or were you just sightseeing in the western crescent all day?”
I bit back a smirk. “Some.” I decided to throw him a bone, my discussion with Doug, although I described the Starnian as an anonymous informant. “Have you ever heard of someone named Luna Moth?”
Professional blankness came over Steller’s face. I’d stumbled onto something.
He said, “I’m not sure I’ve heard that name. Off-world?”
“My sources didn’t say,” I said. “But they indicated this person would know how to find Prince Albert. I think I need to follow this before more low-level sex workers disappear.”
An image of my friend Jennah haunted me then, dressed in a translucent skin-fitted jumper, standing at the tube station, heading to her first appointment for the day. My right hand tightened into a fist.
Steller had paused, and I thought I saw wisps of smoke coming from his ears, between the wild hairs. He clenched his bulging knuckles in front of his chin. I could never tell how much the guy disliked me, and disliked having to take me as a detective after my alderman friends closed the vice squad. I gave him a hard time – that seemed an obligation, right, after he told the other supers in private I was a Level 4.5? – but I worked every case like it was my best friend’s life on the line.
He said, “Is there anyone there with you, Lieutenant?”
I said, “Not unless they let themselves in while I was gone and somehow avoided my drones.”
“Fine. Luna Moth, then.” He glanced down, reading from another display. “Off-worlder, thought to be from the Vega system, but no confirmation. She’s the only one of her race. Came on a derelict freighter eight years ago, frozen in a stasis crib.”
I said, “Ah, shit, the ‘Green Space Lady’? The name should have struck a chord with me.”
“Not really. After JASA figured out how to awaken her, she came out like a moth from a cocoon, unfurled like some green, winged thing. JASA studied her for a few weeks, found no evidence of psychosis or disease, and cleared her to move around. She studied language, grew fluent in Standard, and disappeared into the woodwork it seemed. But then she showed up several months back working a free cult on the East Side, some mystic bullshit. We’ve been keeping an eye on the temple, but there’s nothing suspicious or illegal that we know of happening there. The usual hocus-pocus BS to generate funds, but keeping low under the lidar. Until a few weeks ago.”
“Let me guess, cult members dropping off the grid.”
Steller nodded. “Complaints from parents and communes, but the kids were of legal age, so without evidence of foul play, there was no play for us. But the file’s growing fat.” He paused to chew his ’stache. “I’d give this one to you, but it’s over your head.”
That was worm-brow’s way of challenging me. Generally, I wouldn’t bite, but this case was personal, and getting interesting.
“You got a twenty on her?” I asked.
Steller’s right eye ticked.
He said, “Church of the Woven Way, inside the Fence, close to the old Art Institute.” Of course it was. Lakeshore Drive. The worst part of the Loop. “I’d say don’t go alone, but that would waste my breath.”
“I’ll have Douglas Fairbanks the Starnian introduce me.”
“Take real backup, Colson, not a sliver of walking kindling.”
“Anything else … sir?”
“Yeah. The owner of the Yard dialed me up this afternoon. He thinks we owe him about a thousand credits for damages from a little dust-up one of my officers was involved in a few weeks back. Tell me it wasn’t you this time.”
“Dinner’s burning, chief. Gotta go.”
I plunked the connection, even though it was supposed to be locked in at the captain’s end. I’d have to explain my powers of control someday, but I planned to keep rolling that bocce ball down the field as long as possible.
Next, I sent Doug a request to meet me at the No. 10 tube outlet at noon the next day, Saturday, as if the days of the week meant anything anymore, and to prep for heavy shit. It took a while for the response to come back, but he agreed. I was still his favorite turd cop, after all. At least if he was working with me, he could beg off any other snarks trying to get him involved in local business. I’d gotten him home alive every time so far. And I’d busted up the two assholes harassing him at the Yard that night Steller was referring to.
I narced some sleep, then in the morning did some stretching and inverted tai chi, followed by a water hammer treatment and a light breakfast. Mail, weekly credit report review, bills, memory booster, the usual Saturday routine. I took a tube pod north and then the east split, ending at No. 10 station. Doug was there, dressed in very un-Starnian duds, charcoal shirt and pants, wide black belt, black foot gloves to match. Like he was ready for spy work, which fanned the fire of my unease.
His mouth murmelled and the voice box said, “I knew I’d regret theeing you.”
I said, “Anything you need to tell me about this Moth chick before we cross the fence?”
A Starnian’s ocular plate never changed appearance and was incapable of expression, but still he seemed to eye me with greater intensity. If the gray-skinned dude had had ears, they would probably have laid flat against the sides of his dome.
He shook his head. “You’ll find out. But don’t ex-thpect me to hang around after I make the in-troduction.”
The Loop was ringed by the Fence, three concentric semicircles of electrified razor wire, each twenty meters tall, separated by open gaps of ten meters. Formal gates pierced the fence about every thirty degrees around the perimeter. All of it was built by the Feds thirty years earlier in the 2050s when they still printed money. They’d set it all just out of reach of the lingering radioactivity from what was left of Chicago’s downtown. I was barely out of the incubator and weaned then, still belching up the remnants of synthetic amniotic fluid.
I led Doug to the gate and flipped my official credit chit at the two guard attendants. The guys were big, one dark and big, the other blond and big, as dumb and bored as zombie rabbits, dressed in the green and black uniforms of the West Side Warren. Even cops had to pay to go through the formal gates, although I knew about a half-dozen secret passages. With so many tech eyes in the sky and ground and water, stealth was a fantasy anywhere in the Loop, and I wanted this Moth woman to see me coming.
No sooner had we gotten inside the Fence, a half-dozen squatters came at us with rough aluminum blades, and one of them had a bonafide zap gun. The gate rules barred us from bringing in any real tech, but I had a single-burst plasma embedded in my wrist and took out the hunchback carrying the zapper, while Doug dealt with the first two blade-toters. The captain didn’t think much of my using a Starnian for backup, but they were lightning-fast, and Doug had installed titanium bone sheaths, which added a little more smack to his strikes. Three of the squatters lay where we left them, and the others ran.
It might seem like I don’t like Doug, or I just use him for information as payment for some protection. I don’t protect people for perks. Not my style. I protect people for two reasons only; because it’s my job, and because they deserve it. Doug worked his ET ass off, at everything I ever saw him do, including guiding me away from some danger I wasn’t seeing. Like most ETs, he was looking for a place to close his ocular plate in peace and quiet. In a way, with his natural birth, alien or not, he was less of a freak than I was.
Some of the other cops called us Batman and Robin. Perverse, but funny too.
The tubes had long since rotted under the Loop’s broken streets, but we tagged an electric rickshaw and let the driver, a Melanesian frogman, take us through the maze of collapsed buildings and rubble, toward Lakeshore Drive. Like I said, it had been a couple years since I stepped inside the Fence, and the time hadn’t healed any wounds there. An effort had been made years earlier to swab the radioactive dust away, and most of the iron and other metals that would hold roentgens had been hauled off for salvage. So, the place really wasn’t as bad as most people think, but Doug and me would need a cleanse and purge afterwards. Prevention better than the cure, blah blah blah.
The ’shaw dropped us a few crumbled blocks from the old Buddhist lair that Luna Moth had repurposed for her temple. I imagined this green space woman, who seemed to have never had her picture taken, as a lime-skinned female monk in a brown robe and sandals. I missed her by kilometers.
You couldn’t miss the temple, though, not because it was so grand or shiny, but because the whole block it sat in and the streets around it had been cleared of debris. The temple itself, an ivory block of plaster set on top of a half-story of brownstone, had been repaired, mostly. As we walked up in the early afternoon heat, two young humans in tan denim work pants and pale green shirts were working on the façade near the marble entry, one filling in gaps in the gray mortar, the other gluing pieces of stone into open chinks.
Doug ignored them and stepped into the shadow of the entryway and through double glass doors, which were pinned open. I followed, thinking maybe we should ask directions. Inside, there were no guards or reception, which I thought was odd and risky. Doug paused for a beat in the internal lobby, a wide hallway with pale green walls, laid in with black and white marble tiles. The tile grout had been replaced or dyed pale green to match the wall color, the color of unripe limes, the color of a Luna moth’s wings. Large tapered pots sat on black tables in the room’s corners, and dark green leaves like knife blades rose from them in bundles. On the walls were pastel landscapes, except for the wall immediately opposite the entrance doors.
The painting here was a portrait, obviously of the woman known as Luna Moth. I wondered how she’d chosen the name, but that wasn’t important, not nearly as much as how appropriate the name was.
Her face was nearly human, although a bit narrow, pale green, with wide-set dark, round eyes and feathery appendages rising from her head just behind small, tufted ears. She lay belly down on a large, spade-shaped leaf. Draped over her back were two wide, curving wings. The perfect descriptive word for those wings came to me, a word I doubt I’ve ever used in my life before or since – diaphanous. From the painting, I couldn’t tell if they were a garment or a biological feature. The face was bathed in light, giving it a focus that held my eyes.
A small, thin girl no older than eighteen strolled from a side archway and joined me and Doug at the painting. Her skin was porcelain smooth and her dark hair clipped to millimeter length. She wore the same green and tan clothing as the two workers outside. She breathed in deeply, as if sampling someone’s perfume. She reminded me of Jennah.
“She is remarkable, isn’t she?” the girl said reverently.
I said, “If you say so.” I noticed the painted figure’s eyes weren’t black, as I’d thought, but emerald green, like two round jewels set wide in her narrow face. I pulled my cop ID and flashed it, for what it was worth. The girl hardly noticed.
I said, “Is she available for an interview?”
The girl’s expression didn’t change, which annoyed me. Her eyes lingered on the painting. “Those who seek her may find her.”
“I seek her.”
“Then please follow me.” She didn’t look at me but started back down the hallway from where she’d come.
Doug said, “If you don’t mind, this is where I leave you. I don’t want what these people are thelling.”
“And what exactly is that? What are they selling?”
I needed to catch up with the young woman and couldn’t wait for his answer. I walked away and out of sight down the side hall.
I caught the girl’s tail turning into a side door and picked it up to catch her. The door opened on what was probably a chapel or meditation room – I don’t know Buddhism. Whatever, the place had been cleaned out, and now filmy white baskets large enough to each hold a human adult hung from metal-reinforced roof beams. Someone had spent money in that room, on the structure. Some of the baskets were occupied by people in white garments. More of the workers moved among them, handing out small white towels and opaque yellow bulbs which the hanging people sucked liquid from. Pale green moths the size of my palms fluttered among the baskets. The overall effect of the place was dreamy and sleepy, a feeling that would make my skin crawl if I stayed long.
Through the hanging laundry bags came the girl from the hallway, and behind her the person I’d come to see, Luna Moth. Gliding through the baskets, she was even more striking than her image in the painting. She was a small woman, coming up no higher than my chest. I was drawn immediately to her eyes, real jewels, glowing emerald, and the soft down of beige fuzz that covered her head starting just behind her eyes and ears. Her feathery antennae bobbed as she stepped, and her wings waved behind her in the heart-shaped frame so like the Luna moth photo I’d studied the evening before. Her body tapered down to thin legs and small feet or peds or something. Her gauzy ivory robe and shawl added to the moth image. I expected her to bend her knees and push off for the skylights at any moment.
The young woman bowed to the moth woman, then to me, and then stepped around us and out of the room, leaving us standing a meter apart trading looks. Luna’s was friendly, human, disarming. I’m not sure what mine was.
Her voice was human enough, soft, not some weird alien jive. If she had an accent, it was notable only because it wasn’t blunt Chicagoan.
“I am called Luna Moth. Not a name I give to myself, but it finds me all the same. Nira tells me that you have come seeking me.” She said it like it didn’t surprise her, like she’d expected me.
“I’m Colson. Lieutenant Colson. Chicago PD.”
Before I could ask any questions, she tipped her head and her jewel eyes surveyed me side to side, spinning in their sockets. Revolting. But I felt something weird flutter from my gut to my throat.
She said, “Oh, you shine, Miss Colson. You should have come sooner, so I could help you. But it is still good you come today.”
I said, stumbling, “I don’t know what you mean.”
She smiled, revealing teeth like polished alabaster. “You burn with light, my young friend. There’s a flame eating away at you, consuming you, turning you to ash. Do you not feel it?”
The weirdness started messing with me, and I hate that, so I let the anger spill over.
“I came to check on some missing young people and a Starnian. The trail leads here.” I started to pull my data pad out to show her photos and ask if she’d seen them, knowing she’d say no whether she had or not.
Before I could pull the photos, she said, “Yes, they are here. Come.”
Shocked, suspicious, and now even more alert, I followed her through the baskets and then past an arched doorway, down another pale green hallway with landscapes of orange pastures and forests and green skies.
She led me through another door, this one heavy, smoked glass, into a large, private garden. Beautiful, not like a garden, really. Not like Eden. Like a jungle, with no visible roof, and plants I’d never seen before: trees with heavy stiff branches and hand-sized leaves, other plants with woody stems but leaves like green body bags. She stopped just inside the garden. The smells were totally foreign to me, fragrant plant odors, dirt and loam. Exotic flowers. I could see why someone might want to spend time there. The only place close was the green wild that had grown from the ruins of the old Brookfield Zoo. Small birds flew among the flowers and greenery, probably too small to hunt butterflies and moths but with big twittery voices. Yeah, I could have spent some time there, if it hadn’t been for the creepy cult vibe.
I wondered why we were there and where the kids might be, or if that was a total head-fake.
She said, “We are about personal transformation here.”
The cult weirdness again, like some pretentious play-acting that they were all buying into. Except me. I wanted to know where Jennah was.
“Look, I’ve got some photos here—”
“They are all here, I assure you, Miss Colson. I’ll let you meet them in time, but you are the need now. You crave transformation. You do feel that, I know.”
I felt something, and it wasn’t appropriate.
I’ve been with women, and it’s alright. But I don’t let myself get seduced. For me, sex isn’t about sharing love or even about pleasure – you can get the best of that from toys. It’s about control, even at its most earnest. But under this woman’s eyes, I was feeling control slipping away. I needed to get to the case and get out of there, and I was beginning to understand Doug’s reluctance to stick around.
I said, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re getting at, and I’m starting to lose my patience. Let’s you take me to these people you think I’m looking for.”
She didn’t move from the spot, but the green eye on the side of her head facing me swiveled in my direction.
She said, “You have come to us with weapons and great strength and speed. Why do you fear us?”
“I don’t,” I said, “but all this parading around is making me edgy. I don’t know you or any of these people. Let’s get to the captives. Now.”
“Captives? Hardly. But wait, you surely have a given name. Will you share it with me?”
I took a deep breath. “It’s Rhonda.”
“Rhonda.” She said it like she was tasting it. “No one is ever captive here, or coerced to come or stay. If you doubt that, ask any of the people you see meditating, teaching, tending the transformation garden.”
Had to admit, no one I’d met seemed desperate or preoccupied, like they were under duress. Didn’t mean they hadn’t been brainwashed.
She said, “Would you like to go to these people you think are captives?”
I had the urge to prime the plasma gun in my arm. “Good idea.”
She stepped off among the plants, gently pushing the leaves aside for me to follow. There were strands of heavy thread holding some of the greenery aside from the main trail, where white gravel marked the way through the moss-covered dirt. She touched and arranged things as she glided through the foliage, letting her wings flare as she moved, as if using the room’s air for levitation.
She led me to a grove with the cloudy Chicago sky flowing overhead. In clusters of two and three hung sacks, each large enough to hold a large animal or a person curled within, sacks made of dried leaves stitched together by the same white thread I’d seen in the garden.
They were cocoons. My stomach lurched.
She said, “As I told you, our mission is transformation. People come to us to become something different than they are. Something better, something greater.”
To that, I said, “People can do whatever they want, as long as it’s consensual. I frankly don’t give a shit. But preying on young people is a pet peeve of mine.”
“They come of their own accord, Rhonda. We don’t advertise, we don’t proselytize. But word of our promise reaches those who need us, so they are called, just as you were.”
“I wasn’t called,” I said. “I’m here on official police business looking for missing persons, and it’s time you took me to them, if they’re here.”
I flipped out a picture of Prince Albert, a Sternian male, younger and darker than Doug.
Without looking at the picture, Luna Moth said, “He has completed his transformation. He abides in another place now.”
“Dead?” I asked.
“Hardly, Rhonda. Much more alive than he ever was here. With a much richer life, I assure you. Just as you could have, if you would only see that.”
I flipped to the photo of Jennah, a petite, dark-haired waif, anyone’s idea of a vulnerable, barely blossomed woman. Every sex ad in the ether would have a photo of someone like her. I never touched her, and I think she was hurt by that. But come on, the Level 4 cop and the Level 6 prostitute? There are hundreds of movies based on that tired story line. Plus, it just feels wrong.
And don’t give me any of that crap about me helping the girl level up, to improve her life situation. Nobody believes that ever happens anymore. As the saying goes, “Once a Six, always a Six.”
Luna Moth turned her smile to me then, exotic, not quite human, and there was like this hum in my head. “Come,” she said, and gestured for me to follow, her small translucent green hand stroking the air like a wing, and I could imagine those fingertips stroking me.
She took me to a doorway that led into an open-air lounge, where a handful of young people in the temple uniforms sat on cushions in a circle and spoke in light and airy tones, with the energy of the little birds in the jungle room. As we watched, one of them broke down in sobs and the others hummed in some strange harmonies, like the wind blowing over empty glass bottles until the sad one stopped sobbing and lifted his shaven face in a mouth-splitting smile. I could imagine them all taking turns, spilling their guts, revived by the others.
Beyond this was a library of books, white shelves and pale green walls, lined with just paper books, no devices at all. Two old men, shaven but with long white hair combed to their shoulders, swayed in the crazy people baskets and read, one humming quietly. Another young woman with a shaved head was running her finger along one of the shelves. There was a sense of peace and purpose there that I remembered but couldn’t place. Maybe a pre-cognitive memory, as the synthetic persona shrinks called them?
Luna Moth stopped near a group of three of the hanging cocoons and gestured toward the smallest one, something or someone rolled into a great green leaf just starting to turn brown, sewn along the seams in the heavy, braided white thread.
“Cut her down,” I said.
“She is in no danger. She has chosen this transformation, and to interrupt would be devastating.”
I stepped forward, but Luna laid her hand on my shoulder, and I stopped, the hum in my head rising like a woman’s yearning song.
She said, “You’re a bright light, Rhonda, so much brighter than these others. I am drawn to you. There are things I can show you, possibilities, the way forward, your way, only you.”
Visions came to me, broad green and yellow vistas, flying over, my skin open to the air, feeling the warmth of a bright yellow sun, the air flowing over my skin, the smells of flowers sweet as candy and musky pollen, raw and carnal. I am bare, but not naked, no shame at revealing all. I feel the change come over, evolution, becoming something beyond myself, something grander, braided into the harmonic tapestry of the world around.
Like I said, I’ve been with women before, and I like it fine when I’m out on the ledge, but what this green moth woman did to me, I can’t even describe. I think we swung in one of the white hanging baskets, me on my back, her over me like a blanket, her wings draping us in pale green luminescence. I felt what must have been six arms and legs and other things, not penetrating me physically but wrapping me in some weird vibrating embrace. She hummed and whispered and sang, and images of worlds passed through my mind, surrounding me in sensation, smells and tastes, sounds and songs. I was no longer me; I was something new, something I might become, something more. The memory of my quickening and servile existence in the city retreated like some disconnected nightmare, like pictures drawn in charcoal and dirt, where the scene never changes.
As I felt myself being lost, panic and terror gripped me like a fist around my heart.
I don’t remember pushing myself from her grip and climbing from the basket, dressing, grabbing Jennah’s cocoon and leaving the temple, how I escaped, who I damaged in the process.
I assume I didn’t kill anyone, because the captain didn’t hit me with reports of police-involved mayhem at the temple or anywhere in the Loop that evening. To his insistent inquiries, I told him I didn’t find evidence of the missing persons there. He didn’t believe me, but he said he was loath to send others into the Loop for a few missing young people. I realize now he considered me expendable. No surprise there. Did I ever matter to anyone? To anyone who mattered to me?
Once a Four, always a Four.
That old joke about the cop walking into the bar? No punchline. The punchline is she leaves and is no different than she was when she went in. Just drunk and broke. But maybe it wasn’t a bar, maybe it was a temple. And she leaves absolved of nothing.
Jennah’s cocoon hangs in a far corner of the commune plot from an old hoist I found, hidden behind a stand of banana fronds. I’ve thought about telling the others there. I check on her nearly every day. She changes, little movements here and there, the leaf now turned totally brown, the threads sagging a little with the weight, as if she’s heavier. I think she’s quickening.
I’ve wondered what she’s becoming, where she hopes to go. And by keeping her there, what was I keeping her away from? Why was I holding her back? To live in this crap hole world where she had no tomorrow, no escape, nothing but that desperate look that she would surely develop?
One night I heard tickling taps on my window and saw fluttering shadows in the outside light where it played on the glass. I lay there awhile, listening to the gentle tapping, watching the shadows in the light. I heard a woman singing, faintly, sadly. After a while, I got up and pushed the window open, but there was nothing. Except, hanging in the light from a twig on one of the plants I kept in the window box, there was a small cocoon, an emerald leaf furled and stitched. Beyond it, the dark jumble of buildings that was the Loop, lit by a few electric lights and red fire here and there.
I sent Doug a message. Tomorrow, he’s going to help me take Jennah’s cocoon back to the temple.
I won’t stay there, after I leave Jennah to whatever she seeks. But I don’t know. What’s there for me to come back to? That same look of desperation that I’ve seen in so many others?
There’s another long dark night ahead, and another and another, and how many more after that? How many more can I face like this?
I don’t know. I just don’t know.
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CJ Erick’s stories have been published by Brilliant Flash Fiction, WMG Publishing, Camden Park Press, and others. His short fiction received a recent Pushcart nomination and inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2023 anthology. He writes in multiple genres, publishes novels in a space fantasy series, and dabbles in poetry. He lives in the Dallas area with his wife and their rescue superhero dog Saber-Girl, calls his sourdough bread starter “Ursula” (K. Le Guin), and cooks crazy-good Cajun food for a Midwest Yankee.
