Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

Nix Severn’s eyelids flutter, and her lips move. The home-away chamber whispers and hums, manipulating hippocampal and

cortical theta rhythms, mining long-and short-term memory, spinning dreams into perceptions far more real than dreams or déjà vu. No outbound leaves the docks without at least one home-away to insure the mental stability of skycaps while they ride the rails.

“You should go to sleep now,” Nix tells Maia, but the girl shakes her head.

“I want to hear it again.”

“Kiddo, you know it by heart. You could probably recite it word for word.”

“She wants to hear you read it, fella” says Shiloh. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it again myself, for that matter.”

Nix pretends to frown. “Hardly fair, two on one like this.” But then she gently turns the pages back to the story’s start and begins it over.

The home-away mediates between limbic and the cerebral hemi-spheres, directing neurotransmitters and receptors, electrochemical activity and cortisol levels.

There was once a sweet little maid . . .

Shiloh kisses her brow. “Still, hell, I don’t know how you do it, love.

All alone and relying on make-believe.”

“It keeps me grounded. You learn the trick, or you washout fast.”

The skycap’s best friend! Even better than the real thing! Experience the dream and you might never have to come home.

The merch co-ops count on it.

“You could look for other work than babysitting EOTs,” whispers Shiloh. “You’ve got the training. There’s good work you could do in the yards, in assembly or rollout.”

“I don’t want to have this conversation again.”

“But with your experience, Nixie, you could make foreman on the quick.”

“And get maybe a quarter the grade, grinding day and night.”

? 165 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

“We’d see you so much more. That’s all. And it scares me more than you’ll ever know, you hurtling out there alone with nothing but make-believe and plug and pray for waking company.”

Make haste and start before it gets hot, and walk properly and nicely, and don’t run, or you might fall.

“The accidents—”

“—the casts hype them, Shiloh. Half what you hear never

happened. You know that. I’ve told you that, how many times now?”

“Going under and never coming up again.”

“The odds of psychosis or a flatline are astronomical.”

Shiloh rolls over, turning her back on Nix. Who sighs and shuts her eyes, because she has prep at six for next week’s launch, and she’s not going to spend the day sleepwalking because of a fight with Shiloh.

. . . and don’t run, or you might fall.

The emergency alarm screams bloody goddamn murder, and an

adrenaline injection jerks her back aboard the Blackbird, back to here and now so violently that she gasps and then screams right back at the alarms. But her eyes are trained to see, even through so sudden a disengage, and Nix is already processing the diagnostics and crisis report streaming past her face before the raggedy hitch releases her.

It’s bad this time. It doesn’t get much worse.

Oma isn’t talking.

“Good day, Little Red Riding Hood . . . ”





3.


Of course, it isn’t true that there are no wolves left in the world. Not strictly speaking. Only that, so far as zoologists can tell, they are extinct in the wild. They were declared so more than forty years ago, all across the globe, all thirty-nine or so subspecies. But Maia has a terrible phobia of wolves, despite the fact “Little Red Riding Hood”

is her favorite bedtime story. Perhaps it’s her favorite because she’s afraid of wolves. Anyway, Shiloh and I told her that there were no more wolves when she became convinced a wolf was living under her bed, and she refused to sleep without the light on. We suspect ? 166 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?