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Drew led Michael and Christina behind a building, out of sight. He raised his Pen and started writing in midair. “The Pens provide for all needs.” Glowing sheets of paper appeared as Drew worked.

  “I didn’t know they did that,” Christina murmured.

  “They’re Magic Pens, remember? In exchange, you’ll guide those the Pens select. People in need. Disillusioned dreamers. Estranged family.”

  “Separated lovers,” Christina said. Michael glanced at her, but she smiled and looked down. “What if we want to stop?”

  “You return to your old lives.” Drew’s Pen produced text with incredible speed. “Remember, you can’t tell your assignment everything. That’s the tricky part. You gotta guide them to make their own realizations. Sometimes, the person refuses the call. The daughter might not want help.”

  “I have to try,” Michael said. “I’m in.”

  “Me, too,” Christina said.

  “Need your signatures first, kids.” Drew plucked two glowing contracts from midair. “Have a Pen?”

  Andrew K Hoe (he/him) is an assistant editor at the Cast of Wonders podcast for YA speculative fiction. He’s been a Californian high school English teacher and an assistant professor of English. Children’s, MG, and YA fiction are his jam! Andrew specializes in writing stories from an East Asian perspective. He writes about complex Asian characters with real desires, ideals, and flaws, and who are more than their stereotypes. His first sale was about a Kung Fu monk who learns to read forbidden books to prove himself. “Of Signatures and Contracts” is about highly successful Asian Americans who discover their love for each other still endures years after their breakup. Note: Drew—who chews gum, wears muscle-shirts, and calls people “boss”—is Asian, too! Andrew’s stories appear in or are forthcoming from: Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove, Cast of Wonders, Diabolical Plots, Highlights for Children, and Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide Vol 6. Web: andrewkhoe.wordpress.com. Twitter: @andrewk_hoe

  The Confessionist

  Ava Kelly

  Vemund pauses, standing on the wet sidewalk. Underneath the overcast sky, twilight stretches through the sloping city. Wealth lives here, in sterile houses carefully hidden behind designer bushes and fences. Not even petrichor feels natural this far across the megapolis. No stench permeates the air, no visible evidence of human misery, although Vemund knows from experience these walls hide just as many vile actions as the paperthin constructs at the other end of civilization.

  The evening is chill enough that Vemund sees his breaths as he exhales. It fits this appointment, in a way; all day he’s been followed by a lingering impression that he’s about to trade his soul away. For almost twenty years, he’s worked as a confessionist. The only job he could ever take, young and untrained, but already buried under unbearable debt. Society needs you, they told him at recruitment. You’d be doing the world a favor. Vemund snorts quietly to himself. The only favor he’s been doing has been to ease abject consciences. Except for the children; sometimes he confesses children and their pain is almost always inflicted by others. They were all worth it, though rare enough to forget how it feels to actually help someone instead of simply dampening the guilt bred by one’s actions, consequences intended or not.

  The house up ahead sits in heavy gray, made of dull steel and concrete and glass, as ashen as the rest of the buildings around it. Cutting through the front garden, the path to his latest client winds in a bend of stone slabs. This one had specifically requested him, even offered a hefty payment for the service.

  His grip tightens. The squeak of his briefcase handle gets lost in the whoosh of the hightrain flying up above.

  The entire trip here, he’s been wondering how much of an abomination he’d have to take on for the offered honorarium. He hasn’t wavered, though. Can’t. Not when it means he can forgo the fifty or so confessions he’d need to finally settle his score.

  He’d be free. He will be free, after this.

  But will he be able to carry it? Whatever the monster in this house did, Vemund will have to watch it, assimilate its effects, and live with them forever. With a trembling hand, he touches the back of his shaved head, over the place where the neural implant sits.

  “Last one,” he whispers, and steps forward.

  A smiling man answers the door at the first ring. Medium build, a little shorter than Vemund, clean shaven. Wearing a dark sweater, the same gray of the concrete and the sky and the house he occupies.

  “Hi, I’m Obe. Please, come in.”

  Obe keeps smiling and Vemund shudders. He’s never been afraid before.

  After removing his shoes and coat, Vemund follows further inside. When instructed, he sits at the dining table. Its glass surface shines pristine, just like everything else in this place. The space is wide and open, any separation made from transparent material. No color, no personal touch whatsoever.

  Even the tray with tea that Obe sets on the table permeates sameness. While he pours and serves, Vemund retrieves his tools from the briefcase. He sets them down on a paper pad between them after Obe takes the opposite seat. He’s dropped his façade of hospitality, instead studying the items with an intensity Vemund’s rarely seen before.

  “The pulsers”—Vemund begins the requisite explanation, opening the small box to reveal the round neuro-actuators—“go onto your temples. They—”

  “I’ve done this before. They modify the neural connections forming the memory that I write down.” Obe picks up the pen, twists it around. “With this thing: coated in enough sensors to read my entire mind.”

  Vemund swallows, loud enough in the silence that Obe notices. He leans over the table slightly.

  “Your implant will absorb my experience as if it were your own, and what remains will be distant for me. Like a scar over a healed wound.”

  “That’s how it works.” Vemund’s voice cracks, but Obe doesn’t comment on that, so Vemund counts his lucky stars and tries to move forward. “How long ago was your last procedure? If less than a year, I’m afraid we can’t continue at this time. Health concerns, you see.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Obe gestures at the tea and Vemund shakes his head.

  “I was a child, back in the Zar boroughs,” Obe finally says. “I had witnessed a terrible thing during the riots. It left me . . . distraught. No, damaged. I was damaged. In fact, it was you who confessed it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vemund interrupts, “you must be mistaken. I’ve never treated a boy in Zar.”

  A wry twist of lips, and Obe’s eyes darken in the lowering light. “Yes, you did.”

  It clicks, immediately. Vemund’s perspective shifts from dread toward curiosity.

  “Ah. My apologies. One should never assume, least of all me.”

  “Unnecessary,” Obe says, lifting a long-fingered hand. “You’ve been in my head, but couldn’t have seen what I wasn’t aware of at the time. Understanding came later for me.”

  Vemund nods. The tea by his elbow steams with a gentle aroma and, despite himself, he picks up the cup. Takes a sip, under Obe’s assessing gaze. Obe should be uncomfortable, the confession always is, and yet . . . Here, in this cold, gray house, the new information soothes something long torn beneath Vemund’s skin.

  The first to break the stillness is Obe, who attaches the pulsers to his temples. Vemund’s pad swooshes over the glass as Obe pulls it closer.

  “It’s part of why you’re here, really,” he says. “You gave me serenity. Peace of mind.”

  He bends over the paper, smoothing it out with one thumb. The other clicks on the power button of the pen and Vemund’s implant fires. His eyelids flutter until the connection finally settles.

  Eyes downcast, Obe breathes in deeply, his growing confidence resonating through the uplink.

  “I wanted to thank you. Easing my pain gave me clarity and presence. It allowed me to learn, and live, and make something of myself. It let me discover who I am, what I want. What I love. How to love, both myself and others.”

  Th
e tip of the pen touches the paper.

  It was spring, March 12th. At that time I was exploring what it meant to be me. Half wary, half excited, a lot afraid. Didn’t feel comfortable in public, didn’t want to explain myself again.

  I remember trees in bloom in the park. It wasn’t that warm outside, but the sun was shining that day and I’d missed it. So I went to sit on a bench in the farthest corner I could find, hoping nobody would see me. Wishing to remain invisible.

  A woman strolled by, at some point. She had long, gray hair, wrinkles on her entire face, a large hat with a red bow shielding her from the sunshine. She asked, “Do you have the time, young man?”

  I recall experiencing true, pure joy. It was the most vivid moment of absolute and sincere happiness I have ever felt.

  Vemund gasps as Obe’s intense memory gathers in a knot in the middle of his chest.

  Across the table, Obe sets the pen down, eyes back on Vemund.

  “Now we share it.”

  Vemund can’t find the words to reply, but he clutches onto the feeling with everything he has. He’s never had— He hasn’t—

  “Without you, I wouldn’t have been able to create this.”

  Obe presses both palms onto the tabletop.

  The world blooms with color.

  The walls, the ceiling, the floor. Obe, himself, is covered in swirls moving over his dark skin in mesmerizing waves. Everything in Vemund’s body comes to a halt—for one heartbeat—and restarts with the surges of radiance around them.

  “Cyberpainter,” Vemund rasps.

  Obe grins. Wide. Warm. Vemund blinks the blur away, and wipes the wetness off his face with shaky fingers.

  In front of him is not a monster, but the infamous inventor of the holographic technology that spread through the privileged layers of society, increasing in value as it gained more and more uses—like the silent garden back at headquarters, where only the bosses are allowed. But then the artist donated it to the whole megapolis. It spans all districts—there to feed all souls equally, to nourish hope, to provide a ray of light in the harsh reality of the struggling and the unlucky. Some swear they feel strength to carry on when looking at his projections.

  Self-sustainable happiness. Free for all.

  And then it hits Vemund. The job, the payment. He lunges for the pulsers at Obe’s temples, but he steps away easily.

  “I can’t numb your good memory.”

  Obe shrugs. “It’s yours now. Take care of it for me.”

  “Please don’t—”

  “Don’t what? Thank you for saving me?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Vemund says with alarm. “Unsanctioned emotion categories are erased.”

  “Fortunately, you don’t work for them anymore. I wired your fee this morning. The hacker I hired has already performed the last of your payments for you and handed in your resignation. It finished processing right before you knocked on my door.”

  Vemund staggers back. “That’s—” Too much. Too much kindness.

  “I wouldn’t even have lived to see that day at the park if it hadn’t been for you and your magic pen. Search for me in your databanks; I know you can.”

  Sure enough, it comes to the forefront of Vemund’s mind. The saddest, smallest child. His first client, whom he’d coaxed into drawing the scary boo. The hurt from back then returns to spill over Vemund’s cheeks again.

  “Don’t you get it? You saved me so I can change the world. Starting with you.” As he speaks, Obe rounds the table until he’s close enough to touch the side of Vemund’s neck. “No more debt. No more forcing people to carry pain and secrets. No more high-tech sin-eaters absolving humanity of its horrors.”

  His palm slides, fingertips reaching the surgical scar on the back of Vemund’s head.

  “This gift should only be used to heal. Will you help me make that happen?”

  Vemund nods, unable to find his voice, but Obe must get it, because he grips Vemund’s shoulder with his free hand, and whispers—echoes joy in polychrome brightness—

  “Then welcome, confessionist, to your new life.”

  Ava Kelly (they/them) is an engineer with a deep passion for stories. Whether reading, watching, or writing them, Ava has always been surrounded by tales of all genres. Their goal is to bring more stories into the world, especially those of friendship and compassion, those dedicated to trope subversion, those that give the void a voice, and those that spawn worlds of their own. Long ago, Ava has begun the trek through the artworld with photography, the cello, and poetry. In another artlife—because what is engineering if not creation—Ava is tinkering with artificial intelligence, robots, and all sorts of systems, but that is nothing compared to the challenge of foodmaking. Currently, Ava enjoys experimenting with recipes, with about half successes. And half works in progress—insert wise wink here. As in, we are all journeys, not destinations. avakellyfiction.com

  Mightier

  Elizabeth Shaffer

  “And now, Vigilante Class of 2025, as we conclude our graduation ceremony here at Heroes University, we come to the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” The university president paused for dramatic effect. “The Gifting.”

  Essie released the breath she’d been holding and followed her classmates to the edge of the stage. The Gifting was the highlight of graduation for new superheroes. In a few moments, Essie would be given a magical object that would grant her a superpower. And that superpower would define not only her career, but her life.

  No pressure.

  “Michael Adamson,” the president announced, and the first student started across the stage. “Chosen hero name: Punch Blaster. His Gift is . . . ” The student knelt in front of an old wooden chest and lifted the lid. “The Gloves of Strength!”

  The student pulled a pair of crimson leather gloves out of the chest. As he donned the gloves, his biceps swelled, bursting the seams of his graduation gown. Applause erupted from the audience.

  “Lakisha Bentley, chosen hero name: Ebony Starlight. Her Gift is . . . The Necklace of Invisibility!”

  Essie’s knees were starting to feel like the ballistics gel dummies they used as target practice in Advanced Bullet-Stopping junior year. What kind of Gift would she get? A hero’s Gift always highlighted their strengths, but Essie had aced every class (including the dreaded Cape Precautions 101). Essie wasn’t one to brag, but she had a lot of strengths to choose from.

  “Jamie Chavez, chosen hero name: Burning Angel. Their Gift is . . . The Cloak of Fire!”

  Essie was next. She could feel sweat dripping from her armpits, and it wasn’t due to the sudden blaze of heat coming from the fiery inferno onstage that had—up until moments ago—been a graduate. Maybe Essie’s gift would be magic boots to increase her running speed. Or maybe she would get a cape that allowed her to fly. Or maybe . . .

  “Esther Dearing, chosen hero name: Hope Bringer. Her gift is . . . ” Essie made her way across the stage. The bright spotlight warmed her face as she knelt before the chest. Her hands shook, but she grasped the lid and lifted it.

  In the bottom of the chest lay a hot pink gel pen.

  “The Pen of Friendship!”

  “What kind of name is ‘The Pen of Friendship?’” Essie muttered to herself as she stood up, pen in hand. This was when she was supposed to get her superpower, but Essie didn’t feel any different. She looked back at the president, but he had already started reading the next graduate’s name. A smattering of applause trickled throughout the audience as Essie made her way into the wings.

  What was she supposed to do with the Pen of Friendship?

  That night, Essie sat on her bed, sulking. She knew she was sulking and would have willingly admitted she was sulking if anyone had asked. But no one had asked because everyone else was out partying with the graduates who had actually gotten cool Gifts. Which was why Essie was sulking.

  She had donned her regulation hero uniform hours ago, but she was still trying to convince herself to go out on the job. Ho
w could she fight crime with nothing more than unknown powers and a 25-cent gel pen? Now, if her Gift had been some sort of spy tool—a laser or a bomb or a poison dart—that was just disguised as a pen, that would have been a different story. But it wasn’t.

  Or was it?

  Twenty minutes later, Essie had cornered the notorious Doctor Brainmeister in a deserted alley. She had caught him red-handed stealing from the local nuclear waste facility without any protective gear. How that man had gotten his PhD was a mystery Essie would never understand.

  “Stop . . . you! There’s nowhere to run!” Essie barked. It wasn’t her best verbal banter, but Quips and Taunts 101 had never been her strongest subject.

  Essie pulled the “pen” out of her pocket. Now was the moment of truth. Maybe it would knock the bad guy out for her. Maybe it would catch him in a net. Maybe it would tase him. Maybe all she had to do was throw it at the villain, and . . .

  The gel pen bounced off the man’s chest and clattered to the ground. Essie sighed. “Well, f—”

  Essie blacked out as Doctor Brainmeister’s fist introduced itself very forcefully to her face.

  All that week, Essie tried everything she could think of to unlock the pen’s secrets. She tried stabbing a shapeshifter with it. She tried brandishing it as a magic wand against a wannabe evil sorcerer. She tried throwing it as a boomerang, using it as a lockpick, and following it as a compass. She even tried giving it to a supervillain in the interrogation room, hoping it might compel him to tell the truth. But nothing worked. And each day, Essie became more and more convinced that it was just a regular gel pen.

  Late one evening, Essie sat cross-legged on her bed, fiddling with the pen. Maybe she wasn’t meant to be a superhero. She might need to consider other career options. She could always go back to school for. . . Essie tried to think of something other than vigilantism that she wouldn’t loathe doing for the rest of her life.

  Essie sighed.

  “Alright,” she said to the pen. “This is your last chance to do something extraordinary before I use you to fill out college applications and then throw you in a drawer forever. Show me what you got.”