Read Online Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 by Mercedes Lackey - Free Book Online

gestured with a large liver-spotted hand. “The City doesn’t care if you can read. Besides, I need someone to help me around the house. I’m old and ugly and useless, but I have this tolerable place and no children. You’re my cousin’s daughter. You can stay here forever if you like.”
    In a different time she might have mistaken his generosity for loneliness, but now she understood it for what it was. Such was the way of age: it melted prejudice or hardened it. “I want to learn about the world,” she said. “I want to see if there are others like me. If there have been others before me.”
    He was confused. “Like you how?”
    She rubbed an orange peel between her fingers, pressing the fibrous texture of it in the creases of her flesh, considering how much to tell him. Her mother had trusted him. Yet Ma hardly had their gift and even if she did Tara doubted she would have been open about it. Ma had been wary of giving too much of herself away—a trait she passed on to both her children. Among other things.
    So now Tara said, “Others who need to learn more about themselves. I spent my entire childhood being just a bride and look where that got me. I am left with nothing. No children, no husband, no family.” Wasif Khan looked hurt. She smiled kindly. “You know what I mean, Uncle. I love you, but I need to love me too.”
    Wasif Khan tilted his head back and pinched a slice of orange above his mouth. Squeezed it until his tongue and remaining teeth gleamed with the juice. He closed his eyes, sighed, and nodded. “I don’t know if I approve, but I think I understand.” He lifted his hand and tousled his own hair thoughtfully. “It’s a different time. Others my age who don’t realize it don’t fare well. The traditional rules don’t apply anymore, you know. Sometimes, I think that is wonderful. Other times, it feels like the whole damn world is conspiring against you.”
    She rose, picking up her mess and his. “Thank you for letting me stay here.”
    â€œIt’s either you or every hookah-sucking asshole in this neighborhood for company.” He grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “My apologies. I’ve been living alone too long and my tongue is spoilt.”
    She laughed loudly; and thought of a blazing cliff somewhere from which dangled two browned, peeling, inflamed legs, swinging back and forth like pendulums.

    She read everything she could get her hands on. At first, her alphabet was broken and awkward, as was her rusty brain, but she did it anyway. It took her two years, but eventually she qualified for F.A examinations, and passed on her first try.
    â€œI don’t know how you did it,” Wasif Khan said to her, his face beaming at the neighborhood children as he handed out specially prepared sweetmeat to eager hands, “but I’m proud of you.”
    She wasn’t, but she didn’t say it. Instead, once the children left, she went to the mirror and gazed at her reflection, flexing her arm this way and that, making the flame-shaped scar bulge. We all drink the blood of yesterday, she thought.
    The next day she enrolled at Punjab University’s B.Sc. program.
    In Biology class, they learned about plants and animals. Flora and Fauna, they called them. Things constructed piece by piece from the basic units of life—cells. These cells in turn were made from tiny building blocks called atoms, which themselves were bonded by the very things that repelled their core: electrons.
    In Physics class, she learned what electrons were. Little flickering ghosts that vanished and reappeared as they pleased. Her flesh was empty, she discovered, or most of it. So were human bones and solid buildings and the incessantly agitated world. All that immense loneliness and darkness with only a hint that we existed. The idea awed her. Did we exist only as a possibility?
    In Wasif Khan’s yard