Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Read online

  Kaleidoscope

  Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories

  Edited by Alisa Krasnostein & Julia Rios

  Copyright Page

  First published in Australia in October 2014

  by Twelfth Planet Press

  [email protected]

  http://www.twelfthplanetpress.com

  Twitter: @12thPlanetPress

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  Design and layout by Amanda Rainey

  eBook layout by Charles A. Tan

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  “Cookie Cutter Superhero” © 2014 Tansy Rayner Roberts

  “The Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon” © 2014 Ken Liu

  “The Legend Trap” © 2014 Sean Williams

  “End of Service” © 2014 Gabriela Lee

  “Chupacabra’s Song” © 2014 Jim C. Hines

  “The Day the God Died” © 2014 Alena McNamara

  “Signature” © 2014 Faith Mudge

  “The Lovely Duckling” © 2014 Tim Susman

  “Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell” © 2014 E. C. Myers

  “Vanilla” © 2014 Dirk Flinthart

  “Careful Magic” © 2014 Karen Healey

  “Walkdog” © 2014 Sofia Samatar

  “Celebration” © 2014 Sean Eads

  “The Truth About Owls” © 2014 Amal El-Mohtar

  “Krishna Blue” © 2014 Shveta Thakrar

  “Every Little Thing” © 2014 Holly Kench

  “Happy Go Lucky” © 2014 Garth Nix

  “Ordinary Things” © 2014 Vylar Kaftan

  “Double Time” © 2014 John Chu

  “Welcome” © 2014 William Alexander

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Title: Kaleidoscope / diverse YA science fiction and fantasy stories / Alisa Krasnostein, Julia Rios, editors; Amanda Rainey, designer; Garth Nix, author [and 18 others].

  ISBN: 9781922101129 (ebook)

  Subjects: Science fiction. Fantasy fiction. Short stories.

  Other Authors/Contributors:

  Krasnostein, Alisa, editor.

  Rios, Julia, editor.

  Rainey, Amanda, book designer.

  Nix, Garth, 1963— author.

  Dewey Number: A823.01

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Cookie Cutter Superhero | Tansy Rayner Roberts

  The Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon | Ken Liu

  The Legend Trap | Sean Williams

  End of Service | Gabriela Lee

  Chupacabra's Song | Jim C. Hines

  The Day the God Died | Alena McNamara

  Signature | Faith Mudge

  The Lovely Duckling | Tim Susman

  Kiss and Kiss and Kiss and Tell | E.C. Myers

  Vanilla | Dirk Flinthart

  Careful Magic | Karen Healey

  Walkdog | Sofia Samatar

  Celebration | Sean Eads

  The Truth About Owls | Amal El-Mohtar

  Krishna Blue | Shveta Thakrar

  Every Little Thing | Holly Kench

  Happy Go Lucky | Garth Nix

  Ordinary Things | Vylar Kaftan

  Double Time | John Chu

  Welcome | William Alexander

  About the Authors

  A Note From the Editors

  Acknowledgements

  Also From Twelfth Planet Press

  About Twelfth Planet Press

  Cookie Cutter Superhero

  By Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Now that Joey was popular, it took twice as long to get from her French class up on the second floor, to the canteen line, and then to the table outside where her real friends were waiting.

  Her new celebrity status was weird and uncomfortable, even worse than that first day of school years ago when she was surrounded by strangers prodding and staring at her left arm, every single one of them insisting, “I’m not being nosy, I’m just interested.”

  All this week, girls pretended like they had always been her friends, chatting about casual things in the hallway instead of ignoring her. So many of them found excuses to touch her—a brush of fingers against her hair or shoulder. She knew why they were doing it, and it was creepy.

  “Oh, you are joining us, then?” said Willa when Joey finally approached. “Thought maybe we weren’t good enough for you any more.”

  Joey gave Willa a Look. She could never quite tell whether she meant it when she was being horrible, or if it was supposed to be ironic. Best to assume the latter, because that meant they could keep being friends. “It’s not my fault,” she said. “I didn’t ask for this.”

  “Poor baby,” said Willa, and that time the sarcasm was really obvious.

  “This is our last lunch,” said Beck, who had been moping all week. “Our LAST LUNCH.”

  “It won’t be for long,” said Joey. “I’ll be back in six months. Girls never last longer than a term.” She groaned. “I’ll have so much to catch up on before the exams.”

  “What do you need exams for?” said Willa. “You’ll be famous. A couple of shoe endorsements, maybe a soft drink, and you’ll be set for life.”

  Joey gave her a hard look. “I want to be a vet. That means exams.” She wondered whether there would be space in her new room in the Sky Tower to keep up with her classes, or if it was a waste of time to even try. Could she hire a tutor or something? Bad enough that she would be months behind her friends—but she dreaded even more that the school would let her off all her exams at the end of the year and give her fake As.

  “Six whole months,” moaned Beck, interrupting Joey’s sudden frantic thoughts about the horrible potential consequences if university gave her fake As too, because of who she used to be. Who she was about to become. She would be the worst vet ever. Animals would die.

  This whole thing was a terrible idea. And there was no getting out of it now.

  “Do you think you’ll be a Legacy?” asked Beck, mumbling into Joey’s shoulder.

  “Oh come on!” said Willa. “Can’t we talk about something else? Everyone asks her that. It’s not like she even knows. The machine decides everything. Who’s in, who’s out, I bet it even picks a costume for you.” She gave Joey the closest thing to a sympathetic look that she’d ever managed. “I’m more interested in Astra. She’s pretty hot, and she’s been in the team for a year and a half. How would it feel to be kicked out now?”

  “Maybe you’ll be the new Astra,” said Beck, perking up a bit. “Her costume is nice, and she doesn’t wear a mask.”

  “The girls never wear masks,” said Willa. “They just change their hair color. Got to be recognizable for the sponsors, right?”

  “Maybe Astra won’t be the one to go,” said Joey. That was the part she felt sort of worst about. She liked Astra a lot. She was way better than the last couple of Astras, who were boring carbon copies of the original Astra from five years ago, the posh one who now shilled for perfume companies. She was also more normal and down-to-earth than Magma, that crazy lava hero with the enormous rack, or Sigil, whose power
s never had been properly explained, but wore the costume that put fear into Joey’s heart, the one with strips of grey lycra and see-through plastic bubbles.

  If she was going to be a Legacy, please please please let it not be Sigil. Costume redesigns never went well with the populace, and Joey was so not wearing bubbles.

  The current Astra was tough and funny and had flippy blonde hair that always looked great. You could do way worse than being the new Astra. Except of course then everyone would go on about how Joey wasn’t as good as the last one. That was the trouble with Legacies—it gave the media an excuse to criticize either you, or all the heroes with the same name who came before you.

  Possibly Joey had been reading way too many hero mags lately.

  She was trying not to think about the others, the men whose team she would be joining. They were just terrifying, all muscles and smiles. How would she ever fit in with them? How would she ever manage a coherent sentence in the same room as Surf, Shaggable Bloke of the Month in Cosmic Magazine six months running, or Solar, Bachelor of Steel, who was basically built of shoulders and handsome?

  Then there was The Dark. She was going to be colleagues with The Dark. They’d probably have to have conversations with each other. It was all too big to fit inside her head.

  “If you’re not a Legacy,” said Beck. “Maybe you’ll be an Original?”

  “That’s rubbish,” said Willa. “Much better to bring back a retro identity. There are so many cool female heroes who get ditched after a single term and never make it back as a Legacy. Remember Disco Doll?”

  “Oh, not Disco Doll,” Joey groaned. “I’m not defending justice in a mini-skirt and roller skates.”

  “No one remembers Disco Doll, Willa,” said Beck, unusually sharp for her. “She was in the team before we were even born.”

  “That’s my point,” said Willa. “It’s a terrible waste. All the Legacies lately have been recycling the same heroes from the last decade, with the occasional blast from the past from like, the 90s. No further back. Do you know how many awesome heroes there were in the 80s? In the first teams?”

  “Yes, obviously we know, because you keep telling us,” said Joey. “Do you know what else female heroes were doing in the 80s? They were sidekicking. Is that what you want me to try for? I could be Darkgirl, the kid sister to The Dark, who only fights the villains in pinafores and pigtails. Or Lady Surf, always riding a few waves behind my senior partner, and wearing a costume with his sponsors all over it.”

  “You’ll be sorry when you end up as Astra 5, and no one ever remembers your name because the only obvious thing about you is that you’re not her, or the one before her,” huffed Willa.

  There was a long pause as Joey glared at her and Willa stared at her lunch.

  Two girls came over, the kind who managed to make the school uniform look extra neat and somehow fashionable. They wore three pairs of socks and very discreet tiny earrings, because that was the most you could get away with about being different in this school. The fact that they did it identically kind of wrecked the effect.

  “You’re Joey Marriot,” said one of them, as if Joey might not have noticed.

  “Get stuffed,” said Willa. “Go on, hop away.”

  “Are you going to be a Legacy?” asked the other girl. “Do you know which one you’re going to be? Will you be the new Astra?”

  “I don’t know,” Joey said tiredly. “Leave us alone, will you?”

  The first girl leaned in, speaking in a voice that was obviously trying to sound kind and concerned. “So when you become one of them, are they going to do something to fix your stump?”

  “Wow,” Joey said, ten minutes later as she and Willa stood outside the principal’s office, waiting to be seen. “Talk about retro. You haven’t done that since primary school. Hitting some kid for asking questions about my arm.”

  “Technically banging two girls’ heads together is not the same as hitting them,” Willa said primly.

  “Pretty sure it’s still assault.”

  “Well, sure. They got on my nerves.”

  “Are you going to follow around all the reporters who ask me the same questions? Because they’re going to, you know. For months.”

  Willa gave her a sidelong look. “Not if the machines do give you a new arm. A power arm. With spikes on. I can see the action figures now…”

  “They’re still going to ask about it, aren’t they?” Joey sighed. “Even if the machines give me eight arms and turn me into Octogirl, queen of the super squid people.”

  “It could happen, though, couldn’t it? Everyone knows that The Dark was in a wheelchair before he stepped into the machine.”

  “Yeah,” Joey muttered. “And no one ever talks about how he’ll be in one again when the Lottery retires him.” She held out her left arm before them, so there was no ignoring the way her wrist tapered into a rounded curve instead of a hand.

  Her mum always said she should call it a curve, not a stump or anything ugly. She insisted that everyone treat it as a feature rather than a bug.

  “I don’t reckon I’d want a hand now,” Joey said thoughtfully. “Remember when they tried to give me a prosthetic, when we were kids? It itched and I never got the hang of it, and everything took twice as long as just doing it one-handed. I’d already figured out how to do most things I needed to, by the time I was eight. They said I was too old. If I’d had a prosthetic earlier, I might have learned to do everything with it and not with my … curve.” She shrugged. “Sixteen has to be way too old to learn how to use a superpower hand without making an idiot of myself.”

  Willa banged her head gently against the wall beside the principal’s office. “Six months. Maybe even a year if you make it to a second term. That’s forever. You won’t be able to come back here to visit while it’s all going on, will you?”

  “I might.”

  “No, you won’t. Because of leading supervillains to the school. You’ll disappear into Teen Hero Magazine, and even when they retire you for some other chick, you’ll be young enough to get a record deal or whatever.”

  Joey screwed her nose up. “As if. I’m not going to forget my friends.”

  “They’ll be your friends instead. Your team. They all got stamped out of the same machine, right? So it will be programmed in. You’ll be BFFs with the Cookie Cutter Superhero Power Club, hanging out in the Sky Tower and talking about, I don’t know, wanky hero stuff.”

  Joey shoved Willa hard with her hip, and used her curve to smack her on the forehead. “I reckon I can still text you while saving the world. Don’t be jealous of them. It’s not like there’s going to be any other girls in the team to be friends with, is it?”

  Willa brightened. “There’s that, I suppose.”

  There was a Sky Tower in every country that had a superhero machine. The Australian one loomed right over the Sydney Opera House, taking its place on tourist postcards.

  Joey had not been inside the tower since a grade six excursion. She remembered stairs, whirling around and up so very high that Betsy Lewis had threatened to be sick, while all the boys pretended they were going to drop things from their pockets when they got to the top.

  She’d met real live members of the team then. Solar, of course, and The Dark. Neither of them had changed in decades. They were joined by Speedster, not the original Speedster who died back in the mid 90s, but the young one with hipster glasses and thin dreadlocks that rattled when he ran. There was Beserker, the one who dressed like a Viking and used a power punch in battle. No one had ever brought him back as a Legacy. There were some hero concepts that just sucked too much to bring back. Oh and there was Lyrebird, the only girl, who was super flametastic and everyone said might be secretly hooking up with Solar.

  That sold a lot of magazines, Joey remembered vaguely. Lyrebird had been popular—she stayed in the team nearly three years. That was almost unheard of for a female superhero. But she had to leave to make way for Sonara, who made way for Firework, who made w
ay for Dragon Lady, who made way for Astra and Astra and Astra and another Firework, and Astra again. There was only ever one girl on the team, so they rotated faster than the men. They didn’t have as many Legacies, either. They disappeared after their term, never to be seen again except as pop stars, fashion models, reality TV stars. I’m a Celebrity, Remember How I Used To Have Superpowers?

  “Brought your costume then?” asked the freckled PA who guided Joey from the lobby with its gawking tourists, sandwich bar and souvenir shop, to the private lift used for the team only.

  Joey gave him a blank stare. “What costume?”

  “You know they don’t provide them, right? You have to bring your own. They won’t let you in without it.” He looked earnest, and Joey almost believed him in that second, despite the fact that she had done more research into the team and its rituals than anything else over the last two years.

  “Don’t be a dick, Mezza,” said a voice behind them both. “Playing pranks on the new talent is the lowest form of humor.”

  Joey turned, and her throat closed over for a second or two as she recognized Astra.

  The most famous woman in Australia smiled warmly and flipped her blonde hair at them both. She was in civilian clothes, a shirt and jeans with a silk scarf knotted loosely in her hair, and she looked amazing. Confidence and sunshine and power rolled off her. Joey had never seen such perfect hair before, even on television.

  Astra smiled, and hooked her arm in Joey’s. “Don’t bother coming up, kid. I’ll show the new girl up to the hero pad.”

  Mezza, obviously annoyed that he hadn’t got to continue with his pathetic joke, sloped back to the reception desk.

  “So,” Astra said in the lift. “There will be cameras on you all the time up in the penthouse. Not just for today’s media circus, but all the time. They’re not supposed to be switched on outside official broadcast times, but they often are. If you need to adjust a bra strap or something, take it to the loos, or it will end up on a blooper reel somewhere.”