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

administrator, a chubby short man with filthy cheeks, scratched his chin. “How come?”
    â€œHe was a Frontier Corps soldier. He tackled many such situations before he died.”
    â€œCondolences, bibi .” The administrator’s face crinkled with sympathy. “But what does that have to do with us?”
    â€œAt some point, these terrorists will use the double tap as decoy and come after civilian structures.”
    â€œThank you for the warning. I’ll send out word to form a volunteer perimeter patrol.” He scrutinized her, taking in her hijab, the bruised elbows, and grimy fingernails from days of work. “God bless you for the lives you’ve saved already. For the labor you’ve done.”
    He handed her a packet of boiled corn and alphabet books. She nodded absently, charred bodies and boiled human blood swirling up from the shrine vivid inside her head, thanked him, and left.
    The emergency broadcast thirty minutes later confirmed her fear: a second blast at Data Sahib obliterated a fire engine, killed a jeep-ful of eager policemen, and vaporized twenty-five rescuers. Five of these were female medical students. Their shattered glass bangles were melted and their headscarves burned down to unrecognizable gunk by the time the EMS came, they later said.
    Tara wept when she heard. In her heart was a steaming shadow that whispered nasty things. It impaled her with its familiarity, and a dreadful suspicion grew in her that the beast was rage and wore a face she knew well.
    4
    When matter is heated to high temperatures, such as in a flame, electrons begin to leave the atoms. At very high temperatures, essentially all electrons are assumed to be dissociated, resulting in a unique state wherein positively charged nuclei swim in a raging ‘sea’ of free electrons.
    This state is called the Plasma Phase of Matter and exists in lightning, electric sparks, neon lights, and the Sun.

    In a rash of terror attacks, the City quickly fell apart: the Tower of Pakistan, Lahore Fort, Iqbal’s Memorial, Shalimar Gardens, Anarkali’s Tomb, and the thirteen gates of the Walled City. They exploded and fell in burning tatters, survived only by a quivering bloodhaze through which peeked the haunted eyes of their immortal ghosts.
    This is death, this is love, this is the comeuppance of the two, as the world according to you will finally come to an end. So snarled the beast in Tara’s head each night. The tragedy of the floodwaters was not over yet, and now this.
    Tara survived this new world through her books and her children. The two seemed to have become one: pages filled with unfathomable loss. White space itching to be written, reshaped, or incinerated. Sometimes, she would bite her lips and let the trickle of blood stain her callused fingers. Would touch them to water-spoilt paper and watch it catch fire and flutter madly in the air, aflame like a phoenix. An impossible glamor created by tribulation. So when the city burned and her tears burned, Tara reminded herself of the beautiful emptiness of it all and forced herself to smile.
    Until one morning she awoke and discovered that, in the cover of the night, a suicide teenager had hit her tent city’s perimeter patrol.

    After the others had left, she stood over her friends’ graves in the twilight.
    Kites and vultures unzipped the darkness above in circles, lost specks in this ghostly desolation. She remembered how cold it was when they lowered Gulminay’s remains in the ground. How the drone attack had torn her limbs clean off so that, along with a head shriveled by heat, a glistening, misshapen, idiot torso remained. She remembered Ma, too, and how she was killed by her son’s love. The first of many murders.
    â€œI know you,” she whispered to the Beast resident in her soul. “I know you”, and all the time she scribbled on her flesh with a glass shard she found buried in a patrolman’s eye. Her