Writers of the Future, Volume 28 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lan privately admitted, he’d never given that one a try.
    It was another week after that conversation, in the dead of night, that he decided to take another look about his house. With a mostly full moon in the sky, Lan walked down the lane, now partially overgrown from disuse.
    The house was untouched, dusty and empty. He could see decently well with the light coming in from the windows, but it wasn’t the same as it’d been the many years he’d spent growing from a few tiny baskets to the hundred he had now. He sat heavily in a chair in the workroom, staring at the bare shelves and workbench.
    His night went by no faster here than it did at Jaddi’s house. Time seemed to slow when he had nothing to do, no one to help, until it felt as if it stopped altogether. The moon’s light shining upon the floor didn’t even seem to move at all.
    Wandering further in the house, he stared sadly at the drying room. He’d spent a good bulk of his time here, hanging flowers and stems, crushing them later, draining sap into pots. All of which were now either burned or broken. This room had not been cleaned as the other had. Not as interesting, he supposed.
    So he set to work, mostly unconsciously. Cleaning off the tables and dusting off the hooks. He swept the floor clean, taking bucket after bucket full of debris outside. Then he set about scrubbing with a long-handled brush, not realizing morning had arrived until the sun was already long in the sky.
    He hurried back to Jaddi’s house, glad for the quick night, and glad again for her company. She didn’t ask where’d he been, merely greeted him warmly when he arrived.
    The next night, and every night after that, he went back to Haigh’s house, wiping soot from the walls, mending broken furniture, scouring burned books for pages still legible. There were quite a few, as the fires had been quick work, not thorough.
    That thought gave Lan pause. The queen’s guards would have had plenty of time to burn anything they’d wished. Then again, it could have been out of spite that they had ruined things, angry that Haigh had not given them what they needed. Or the queen needed. Or whoever.
    He spread out the pages worth keeping, carefully scraping off the burned pieces. The rest he scanned. Most were notes from experiments, many of which Lan remembered. Some were even in Lan’s hand. Those were the newer ones when Haigh had trusted him enough to keep track of things. A few, a very few, were from Haigh’s private journals. They had been rarely updated, and when done so, with little emotion. He only wrote factually, as in one page “Finished updating experiment G-kpo4.”
    Lan could read Haigh’s coding easily enough, the first capitalized letter signifying the original recipe, lowercase letters standing for which ingredients were changed and the symbol between standing for how those ingredients were changed—reduced, in this case, with a zero meaning they were taken out completely. A double line with more letters, but before the number, meant there was a substitute. And the number was simply how many experiments in he was. Always at least five of the same. Couldn’t run the risk of bad data.
    The page crinkled under his sudden tight grip and a tear plopped upon the page, blurring some of the letters. Lan quickly dabbed it dry, struggling to remain gentle with the fragile paper. It was all he had left.
    No, that wasn’t true. Lan pressed his wooden fingers against his chest, feeling the hummingbird (chest, center-left column, sixth down) take flight and flutter her wings against her little cage. It tickled, giving Lan a slight smile. There was much Haigh had left, but it was within Lan. Then Lan sighed. Maybe he should put that silly little hummingbird in his head so she’d have more room to fly about. No, he’d as likely lose her while trying to do so, and then he’d have two places aching instead of one. Besides, Haigh had always told him not to put anything breakable up