Hi folks! If you’re interested in the world of Ghosts in Quicksilver, the anthology I’m co-editing has submissions open, now til Dec 1st! Read the full guidelines here: you pitch an idea for the universe, for fiction, poetry, art or multimedia. Don’t self-reject! We want to hear from you.
TW: mental health reference (vague), references to cops/gangs
I came to slowly, glimpses of memory mingling with whatever I’d been dreaming about. Ophis’s hair, pale blonde like cornwisps escaping from her bun—dappled forest glades, but I doubted those were real—the quicksilver glimmer of Kiera’s skin shifting, and screaming.
The stars I’d been staring at turned into a fuzzy light on the back of my eyelids, and when I opened my eyes, I was staring up at the scattered dots of a dropped linoleum ceiling. I would have sat up, but my entire body was aching. Adrenaline took its toll.
“Are you awake, or do you just sleep with your eyes open?”
“The first. I’m not enough of a freak for the second,” I mumbled. My mouth was dry.
“Reasonable.”
I supposed the owner of the voice was Ophis—it sounded like her, and from what I could remember, I’d followed her home. Speaking of which—
“How much should I worry about the fact that I can’t remember how I got here?”
“Don’t,” Ophis replied. “You’re traumatized. It’s normal.”
Ah, yes, Traumatized. That word was coming up a lot. “More likely I’m over-tired,” I grumbled, then sat up to try take in my surroundings. At first, I thought she was just short of furniture, but then I saw the stack of chairs and scattered desks at the far end, and looked over at Ophis scribbling on a chalkboard.
“Why am I sleeping in a classroom?”
“Because I live here.”
That was blunt. That was a nice change. I looked up at the fluorescent bar lights, then poked the cheap mattress I was sitting on. Whatever school this was, nobody had used it in a long time.
“…Tech?”
She paused in the middle of her drawing, then chuckled. “You are good. Yes, we’re downtown.”
The old Tech school had been closed before I was born, but it’d been one of the first high schools ever opened in Ottawa. These days, most people just knew it as an empty sprawling building on Albert Street, with the occasional class or support group inside. I could see its appeal as a hideout.
I propped myself up against the wall, then realized what she was writing—or rather, drawing. It was a mandala, something I only recognized from the six or sessions of court-mandated therapy I’d been forced into after Johara’s accident. They were meant to calm you down, center your mind. She must have been nervous, not that I could tell from the cool way she carried herself. It was odd. When she’d shown up on that rooftop, she had looked so put together. I’m sure lots of people would have seen her exactly the same way now—she still had the suit on, and the bun of gold-white hair gathered at the nape of her neck.
We’re all a little fucked up.
It was the careful way she was concentrating on the mandala, I decided. Living in an abandoned school was another big giveaway. Little pieces and clues.
“So, you can fly.”
“You noticed,” she replied, voice dripping with sarcasm.
I laughed despite myself. “Will didn’t get around to explaining that one, but I’m guessing that’s Air?”
“I suppose it’s one of the more obvious ones.” She put down the chalk and turned to face me. Her face was so blank that I wondered if it was on purpose—I couldn’t tell whether I’d pissed her off personally or if she was just like this.
“My turn for questions.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know what she could possibly ask. I was pretty much what I seemed.
“You’re a private detective?”
“Yeah. I mean… Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“I’m seventeen and my first case involved a dead body. I’m rethinking my career choices.”
She stifled a smile at that, and I decided I liked her, ice queen or not. “I can understand that.”
“Is your name actually Ophis?”
“No, that’s just what Will calls me in her phone. I’m the Cassandra.”
I blinked. “The Cassandra? I’ve met like, six Cassandras.”
“It’s a title. But also my name.”
“With or without the ‘the?’”
She waved her hand at me in irritation. “It confers authority.”
“I’m sure it does,” I said as evenly as I could. If I didn’t, I was going to crack up.
She glared at me, but I could see a twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t that much older than me, and I could see her stony mask conflicting with a friendlier impulse. I got that. She didn’t trust me yet.
“Anyway,” she said, getting to her feet. “Apparently Willow and Avery gave you a bit of an incomplete picture of things. They rushed it—and you’re too important. So given your, ah, precarious position, I’ve brought you here so we can brainstorm the best strategy to protect you.”
…Well. That was a shift in the wind. I’d heard all the stuff about how there were only two Salts left, but it still took me by surprise. I wasn’t anything special. Except due to some mass-murderer, apparently, now I was.
Which brought up the main issue.
“Protect me from—Kiera? Who—or what, I guess—is Kiera?”
Cassandra paused, and I could see the uncertainty in her face. Probably deciding how much to tell me. For all that she was promising me useful answers, I wasn’t dumb enough to trust her completely. Whatever ‘the Cassandra’ was supposed to imply, she had some sort of power over Avery and Will. “Um, a wild card. We’re not sure if she’s actually responsible, but she’s not helping.”
“A Mercury elemental. Yeah?”
“Yes, but—something else as well.”
“What?”
“We don’t know,” she admitted. “She showed up a few months ago.”
“And she’s the one killing the Salts.”
“Like I said, we have no actual proof.” Her eyes flashed cold. I could guess what her opinion on the matter was. “But she’s certainly dangerous.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” A shudder ran up my spine thinking about the way she’d talked to me. Looked at me. It had to be because of my powers. Nothing else. “I’m guessing she’s after me for the same reason everybody else is.”
“Afraid so. Hence why we want to protect you—”
Hence. Freakin’ rich kids. Whoever she was now, I had to guess she’d grown up with money. Then I held up a finger. “Wait, wait. Back up. You, Avery, Will—you keep insisting this isn’t a secret society. So who’s we?”
Cassandra paused, then a smile spread across her face. Finally. There was somebody I thought maybe I’d like to know. “What do you know about anarchism?”
“Okay, that’s a bit of a strange start. Not much. Rejection of society?”
“Sort of. It’s a rejection of organized government and law in a broader sense, because, well… It’s not like it’s helped most of us.”
It sounded ridiculous, but to be honest, it kinda made sense. All the same, I had to crack a joke. “Getting a lecture on political systems in a silent classroom. It’s high school all over again.”
Cassandra crossed her arms, unimpressed. “You wanted to know.”
“Okay, so you’re anarchists. What does that mean, other than the fact that you’re on the internet too much?”
“Anarcho-communists, actually—”
“Oh my god.”
“The point is, we organize horizontally, as much as is practical. Cooperation over coercion, and community over tyranny.”
“I’ll pretend that makes sense. And what does that make you?”
“Well, we have leaders in a way.” Cassandra shifted a bit. “I’m in charge of the downtown area but that means more that I coordinate what I can, keep things levelheaded, intervene when necessary… Sometimes people need a tiebreaker.”
“Uh huh. And when somebody decides they wanna be in control?”
“It’s a lot less appealing for somebody to use their powers to screw around or hurt people if there’s ten other people with powers ready to stop them.” She sighed. “And let’s face it, it’s not like we can call the cops.”
I snorted. “Okay, that’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense. I guess that’s why all of Will’s texts were encrypted.”
“Among other reasons. You better not have broken it.”
“Her phone is fine,” I muttered. “But you’re all basically off the grid. Right?”
“To some degree or another. I’m completely underground for reasons of my own. Avery legally exists but stays out of trouble. Willow’s in a grey zone.”
I was curious about the implications of Cassandra not legally existing, but now wasn’t the time to ask. “And you’re telling me all of this because…?”
Now she was smirking. “You can go tell the cops if you want to. Have fun explaining.”
…Crap. “Point. Okay, next question—”
“My turn,” she interrupted. “How’d you get involved with Kiera?”
“I didn’t. I was working on a case.”
“Okay, how’d you get involved with that? I had somebody check, and you’re not a registered private detective.” She added, somewhat unnecessarily, “Not that you could be, legally. For one, you have to have graduated high school.”
“Do you ever shut up?”
“On occasion, but rarely.”
I sighed, leaning back and bonking my head against the plaster wall. “I put up a Facebook ad for investigative services. Mrs. Chaudhury showed up at my office. One thing happened after another.”
“I see.”
“Speaking of, how come you aren’t all out there being superheroes? Especially you, flygirl.”
“Never call me that again. And aside from the inherent impracticality of vigilante justice? We don’t have time.”
“Oh, come on. Who needs a job when you’re psychic?”
“And who’s going to pay somebody who isn’t supposed to exist? Besides, we’re not all psychics.”
I was being facetious, but I couldn’t help it. It all sounded too… perfect. Besides, Cassandra was more spouting theory than really explaining how it worked.
I remembered Lila, and what she’d said. Her turf. Her territory. To be honest, that sounded a lot more like gangs. That figured—there was more than one leader, which worked with whatever semi-structured thing Cassandra was talking about. And Lila had been pretty forceful in trying to get me to come with.
Just like everywhere else. Lots of pretty theory and ideas, but underneath, it was just the same shit as usual. Then it clicked—that was why Cassandra looked so uncomfortable. Her system was breaking down, and she knew it.
I was a power play. And if their community was so perfect and welcoming and about uniting people with powers—well, where had they been when I needed them?
Jeff Vandermeer is probably best known for his Southern Reach Trilogy, which I have yet to read. However, I picked up Borne at the library a little while ago upon a friend’s recommendation, intrigued by its promises of biopunk and a world gone mad.
Borne delivers on these promises in the form of a spooky, ethereal twisted myth that touches on themes concerning parenthood, creation, memory and the relationship between technology and the natural world. Rachel, the narrator and central character, lives in a city devastated by out-of-control biotech in a dying world. She scavenges what she can to survive from the wake of Mord, a giant flying bear that rules over the city mostly through sheer presence – and one day, she finds a little object in his fur that she decides to name Borne. She takes it home to her lover and protector Wick, who immediately tells her to get rid of it – she refuses, and Borne begins to grow and become more and more aware.
Minor spoilers for Borne below; the ending itself is left undiscussed.
There’s a lot to unpack about Borne. The first thing that grabbed me was how it engages with nature, technology and biopunk; rather than the direct nature vs. technology relationship in core science-fiction or the twisted mutants resulting from atomic war, the creatures of Vandermeer’s book are a different type altogether. Human meddling has crossed a terrible line, but much of the cruelty and viciousness of the Company’s creations is part of the natural world as well. Borne needs to eat to survive; there’s nothing unnatural about it other than how he goes about it and the processes he uses.
Besides that, my favourite part of the book is the familial relationship between Rachel and Borne, and Rachel and Wick. While Rachel and Wick are lovers and partners, it’s a bond forged for mutual protection and not intensely romantic. This is even more obvious once Borne reaches the ‘adolescent’ stage of his life – Rachel and Wick, at times, feel like parents on the cusp of separation, still caring for each other but at their wits’ end for what to do next and standing on opposite sides of an uncrossable chasm. Rachel’s affections for Borne are filled with the same kind of conflict. There’s no idolization of the maternal bond here – instead, Rachel replicates mistakes most of us recognize. She tries to teach Borne things he already knows, so she can feel relevant; she ignores warning signs so that she can believe that things are still a certain way. It’s a much more complex and sympathetic – to all parties – portrayal of motherhood than I’m used to in sci-fi, particularly with its focus shifted firmly away from the carrying of a child and towards the raising of one.
From a representation perspective, it’s worth noting that from the narration, Rachel appears to be a woman of colour. I really appreciated this, and it was so nice to see a WOC as the lead in a science fiction novel.
Borne isn’t without its flaws. Some of the mysteries in the book are left dangling, meant for the reader to fill in the blanks themselves, but I personally would have liked answers, or a few more clues. The Magician feels like an underutilized character, who pops up about halfway through the novel and gives only tantalizing glances into her own story. Overall, Borne feels incomplete, which suits a story that feels just as much myth as science-fiction, but lingers nonetheless.
Applicable trigger warnings for the book as a whole include (but are not limited to) proto-cannibalism, gaslighting/unreality, human experimentation, memory altering and war. Borne is available on Amazon.
I picked up NK Jemisin’s Inheritance Trilogy as an omnibus at Chapters a few months ago; I’d heard her name in passing, and finally wanted to delve into her work. Minor spoilers for the books below!
All three books of the Inheritance Trilogy take place in the same world, more or less; the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and more specifically in its ruling city of Sky. a palace suspended by a single pillar over the city below and inhabited by the Arameri. The first book – The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms – concerns Yeine, leader of a nation in the High North, as she comes down to Sky for a meeting. Once she reaches Sky, she is unexpectedly put into the running as heir to Dekarta Arameri due to her half-Arameri heritage – and thrown into the political intrigue of Sky, with its vicious nobles, captive gods and underlying secrets.
I enjoyed The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms a lot, although in retrospect it’s the weakest of the three in the trilogy. Yeine could do with some more characterization on the page, but the captive gods of the Arameri are a lot of fun to explore. Some of them don’t get the focus they could, but Nahadoth and Sieh are alien enough to be interesting and relatable enough to sympathize with. I have a particular affection for the ‘uncanny valley’ of characterization, and Nahadoth and Sieh definitely fall into that – the strange and unknowable, just a little too big to fit between the pages.
The Broken Kingdoms is set ten years after the end of the first book, focusing on a new main character and the changes in the city of Sky. I enjoyed this one although I found it needlessly tragic at parts. There’s a thin line between realistically dark and darkness-induced audience apathy; The Broken Kingdoms never quite falls into it, but skirts the line a few times. However, the main character Oree is blind and can only see magic. I love how her very real disability is worked into the narrative both as something concrete and as a metaphor. I also deeply appreciate the fact that she’s a painter “despite” being blind; a reminder that sensory disability is not as simple as people make it out to be.
Finally, my favourite, The Kingdom of Gods. Sieh is the main character of this one, and I’m ecstatically happy about it. While Oree and Yeine spend a lot of time intimidated and on a very different level from the gods they eventually fall in love, this third book dives into Sieh’s mindset and wrestles with the complications of a god who – by nature – cannot grow up. Shahar and Deka are a fun pair of twins, too, although I found that Shahar got more overall characterization/screentime and Deka more romantic development.
Finally, the omnibus came with a bonus novella, The Awakened Kingdom. (Downside of all the titles including the word Kingdom; it gets easy to mix them up. I tend to call them the Yeine book, the Oree book and the Sieh book.) The novella is interesting, but not quite as meaty as the true novels of the collection, which is to be expected. All the same, it takes on a plot that would have been better suited for a whole novel, especially since it upends the world dynamics once more. The narrator’s voice is fun and engaging, but the main human character is a bit of a stereotype, especially to fit into the Darre matriarchal politics and the message the novella is trying to send.
Overall, The Inheritance Trilogy is one of my new favourites. It’s beautiful, sweeping fantasy, choosing to focus on a single city in depth rather than to give short shrift to wide vistas, and a bittersweet study of the nature of gods, forgiveness and love. However, its human characters tend to be weak as a result, and some of the concepts in it made me roll my eyes. (Darre as the toxic matriarchy for one; I understand why flipping power dynamics is interesting and thought-provoking but I’ve seen it too many times.)
Content warnings for the books include violence, torture, separation anxiety, character death, incest and child abuse. The Inheritance Trilogy omnibus is available in bookstores, or on Amazon here.
In Season 12 of Grey’s Anatomy (two seasons ago now), Denzel Washington directed and Stacy McKee wrote an episode centered around Meredith Grey. The episode – Sound of Silence – has been praised in the years since as a tour de force of television, a fantastic acting job, and an amazing directorial debut from Washington.
However, Sound of Silence draws its terror from places it doesn’t even seem to recognize exist. The opening monologue references the way sexism silences womens’ voices, and then goes on to incapacitate Grey in a brutal attack that shatters her eardrums and breaks her jaw. A ten full minutes of the episode are shot in total silence, reflecting the isolation that Grey is trapped in. The episode is fully aware of how it references sexism; it shows a shocking lack of awareness of the fact that Grey’s temporary condition is a real one for many, many people.
I am hard of hearing. For me, the silence that is meant to demonstrate Meredith Grey’s trauma is a constant. That doesn’t make the episode bad; it’s a wonderful exploration of healing. But where it falls down is in those ten minutes, when not a single doctor makes the effort to communicate with Grey in any way other than talking louder at her. She’s left out of her own medical decisions by people who know that she can’t hear, and don’t seem to consider picking up a pencil, a marker, even doing basic charades in lieu of actual ASL knowledge.
This is a dangerous thing to put into a mainstream show. Dangerous because, without addressing this fundamental failure of care by the doctors in question, it perpetuates the idea that this should be normal. If you can’t hear, forget having any input. It doesn’t matter how you communicate; if you can’t communicate the way that is expected of you, you will be put through hell. Once again, Grey has no input on any of her medical decisions for those ten minutes of the show, which includes a trip to the OR. What was she undergoing surgery for? We aren’t told, and neither is Grey.
This is reality, for far too many people. The d/Deaf community is continually underserved by doctors, especially those who speak ASL in areas with very few accessible translators. In Canada, it’s taken almost ten years to finally institute email communication with doctor’s offices, and when d/Deaf folks ask what alternatives there are to phone calls, the response has been ‘get somebody else to do it for you’. Medical privacy, informed consent, access to medical care – all of these are immensely challenging for those of us who simply can’t hear. And that’s without getting into the complications of communication for neurodivergent folks – autism, ADHD, brain damage, PTSD, selective mutism, and more.
‘Sound of Silence’ is an excellent Grey’s Anatomy episode. It’s beautifully shot, beautifully directed, and beautifully acted. But the terror that it depicts as part of trauma and an allegory for sexism is medical neglect, first and foremost. Next time a character’s rendered deaf – temporarily or otherwise – have their costars pick up a pen.
Elliott Dunstan 