At the Edge of Waking by Holly Phillips Page A

flash drives that will fit into a waterproof container. My message in a bottle. Just in case.

Brother of the Moon
    Our hero wakes in his sister’s bed. Last night’s vodka drains through him in sluggish ebb, leaving behind the silt of hangover, the unbrushed taste of guilt. He rolls onto his stomach, feeling the rumpled bed wallow a little on the last of the alcoholic waves, and opens his eyes. His sister sleeps with her curtains open. The tall window across from the bed is brilliant with a soft spring sunlight that slips past crumbled chimneys and ornate gables to shine on his sister’s hands. She has delicate little monkey’s paws, all tendon and brittle bone, that look even more fragile than usual edged by the morning light. Sitting cross-legged among the rumpled sheets, tough as an underfed orphan in the undershirt and sweatpants she uses as pajamas, our hero’s sister is flipping a worn golden coin. She is a princess. Our hero is a prince.
    The coin sparkles in a rising and falling blur. Our hero watches with bemusement and pleasure as his sister’s nimble hands catch the coin, display the winning face, send it spinning and winking through sunlight with the flick of a thumb. Our hero’s sister manipulates the coin, a relic of ancient times, with a skill our hero would never have guessed. It is the skill of a professional gambler who could stack a deck of cards in her sleep, which is mystifying. Our hero’s sister is not the gambling type. Our hero clears a sour vodka ghost from his throat.
    “You’re up early.”
    The coin blinks at him and drops into his sister’s hand. With her fingers closed around it, she leans over him and kisses his stubbled head.
    “You snore.”
    “I don’t,” he says. “Are you winning?”
    “It keeps coming up kings.” Her monkey’s hands toy with the coin, teasing the golden sunshine into our hero’s eyes. “Who were you with last night?”
    Our hero scrubs his tearing eyes with a fold of her sheet. The linen is soft and yellow with age and smells of his sister, comforting. “No one special. No one. I forget.”
    His sister’s face is like her hands, delicate, bony, feral. Our hero thinks she’s beautiful, and loves her with the conscious, deliberate tenderness of someone who has lost every important thing but one.
    “How do you know I snore?” he says. “You’re the woman who can sleep through bombs.”
    This is literal truth. When the New Army was taking the city and the two of them were traveling behind the artillery line, she proved she could sleep through anything. But she says, “Bombs don’t steal the covers,” and since our hero is lying on top of the blanket, fully dressed, with his shod feet hanging off the end of the bed, he understands that she was awakened by something other than him. It troubles him that he cannot guess what might have been troubling her. Or perhaps it is a deeper worry, that he can imagine what it might have been. He stretches out a hand and steals the coin from between her fingers. The gold is as warm and silky as her skin. The face of the king has been the same for five hundred years.
    “Granddad,” our hero says ironically.
    His sister sighs and stretches out beside him, stroking his head.
    “You need to shave,” she says.
    People have said they are too close. The new government has cited rumors of incest as one reason to edge our hero out of the public eye. The rumors are false, they have never been lovers. But perhaps it is more honest to say that if they are lovers, they have always been chaste. In any event, they are close. She rubs her palm back and forth across his scalp, and he knows how much she enjoys the feel of stubble just long enough to bend from prickly to soft, because he enjoys it so much himself. Her touch soothes his headache and he is on the verge of dropping off when a van mounted with loudspeakers rolls by in the narrow street below, announcing the retreat of the New Army—the new New Army, our hero