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We meet the Princess of Albania, who is as beautiful as she is brave We defeat the zombies of Tokyo We spend a decade as panthers in a deep, wordless forest Our world is stark and wild as winter, fine and clear as glass We are a planet h the black

As alk back over the eh the sand, filling the bay onceelse Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on herand dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is , that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self

I e I have tried so hard to learn the organic ers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like bloodbetween two hearts

Neva crieswith nanites I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for I make my

eyes big and old and my hair unruly and my little body plump I hold up my hands to her, and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms She kisses my skin with iron lips My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines

I burypath out of the churning, honey-colored sea

AFTERWORD

THE MELANCHOLY OF A MODERN GIRL,

OR,

LOVE AND HEGEMONY

Let me take you back in time one decade exactly

Don’t worry The technology is safe Consumer tested and peer reviewed Keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times The nearest exit may be behind you Just step a little to the left, take my hand, and don’t look down

It’s 2003 and we are in Narita Airport A young woman, twenty-three years old, not sixout into the heat of a Japanese suh at her a little as she instantly claps her hands over her ears Where she comes from, on the west coast of the United States, cicada broods don’t burst to life after long periods of dormancy She has never heard one before She does not even knohat the buzzing that fills the wet, close air around her is It sounds like machinery, like electricity Her new husband could tell her that the sound is co from insects, that it won’t stop till autumn But he doesn’t He watches her for her reactions to this new place The girl is very good at reactions Her friends often take her places just to watch her react to the happens on her face and she doesn’t kno to hide anything she feels Yet

All her feelers and dishes and antennae are out and spinning to receive new inforle—she can only think of it as jungle It is nothing like the forests she’s known: the evergreen Cascades, the braland and Scotland The trees are unfaoda pass by in the greenery and it startles her, as anything does when it looks exactly like a postcard she ht send home

This young woh school sweetheart It’s not exactly true She’s married the United States Navy, and the face the Navy wears is one she’s known since she was fourteen He will leave in a feeeks and not return until autu her in Japan with no friends, no contacts, no job, absolutely no point of entrance into this culture Being twenty-three and a roram in medieval studies and folklore, her preparation toJapanese fairy tales, The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book, and whatever stories of yokai and Shinto gods she could find Which is to say, she is not prepared at all She will spend the next year shunned by the Navy wives and struggling to accouidance She will start a blog She rite three novels She will see the man she hasThere is a war on and he will be a part of it It will change hie her