One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries by Marianne de Pierres Tehani Wessely Page B

distended belly. Protective and protecting.
    Brona puffs up to them, cheeks wan and wet. She takes in the depleted skin. The women’s depleted expressions. Splashing, scooping, sniffling, she slouches beneath the weight of all she has done. All she still needs to do.
    Her feet throb, soles shredding again and again, but she refuses the crutch of the women’s arms. Instead, she takes the leather draped across them. Strokes it, folds it, cradles it in the crook of her elbow.
    “ That’s good blood you’re wasting there,” she says, gesturing at the spill on Cora’s skirts, the seep on M’Amie’s arse. “We’ll need that to fix this mess. We’ll need as much as we can get.”
     
    ∞ ¥ ∞ Ω ∞ ¥ ∞  
     
     

Indigo Gold by Deborah Biancotti
     
    “ D on’t you hate that, Kaneko?”  
    He said it like they were in the middle of a conversation.
    Ai Kaneko looked up from her desk. Looked up, squinted, took off her glasses, and leaned back so she could see him better. Merv was wide, but also tall. He had the bulk of a man who really shouldn’t loom over desks blocking out the dawn.
    “ I’m suppose to say, ‘hate what, exactly, Merv’, aren’t I?” Kaneko asked. She tried and failed to keep the frustration out of her voice.
    “ It’s good you’re playing along,” Merv replied. “Keep it up. Let’s pretend I’m the boss around here for a while.”
    He dropped a scrap of paper on her desk. Literally a scrap, since it was torn from the bottom of a broadsheet. It was the story of a car-jacking in the southern suburbs. He’d made a note in thick blue marker over the top of it.
    Merv really was the boss, so she had to pick it up and try to decode what he’d written.
    “ Something, something,” she muttered, “and then another something, and a phone number.”
    “ Oh, yeah, coming back to our earlier conversation. This is what you’re meant to hate,” Merv said. “When crackpots call taking credit for crimes that’ve already been solved.”
    “ That’s what this is?”
    Merv shrugged. “It’s something .”  
    “ You want me to ring up and ask what kind of crackpot they are?” Kaneko offered.
    “ I want you to call up, get an address, and go meet her.”
    “ Why?”
    “ Because she’s got one hell of a story. And you know what stories do?” Merv asked.
    Kaneko didn’t bother to suppress her sigh. “They sell papers, Merv.”
    “ Right. Go make a story, Kaneko.”
    She got to her feet. “And if there’s nothing there to report?”
    “ I said make the story, Kaneko, not find the story. Be a journalist.”  
    She waited too long to come up with a witty response. By the time she opened her mouth, Merv was checking his pockets.
    “ Wait, here’s another one,” he said.
    “ Another what?” Something sour-tasting lodged in the back of her mouth.
    “ Another guy claiming to have some kind of special, super-duper power.” He found the scrap of paper and was holding it at arm’s length. “Says he can find numbers. Whatever that means.”
    “ Find them? What, even the imaginary ones?”  
    Merv didn’t take the bait. “You tell me, it’s your story.”
    He dropped the scrap of paper on the desk in front of her. It had been folded and refolded, the burr of the edges eating away at the numbers marked in heavy pen.
    “ Kaneko, story-maker, Kaneko, lone journo-warrior,” he said.
    “ Is that racist, Merv?” she asked. “I think that’s racist.”
    Merv took a step backwards. Kaneko liked when he did that. She resumed her seat and leaned back, staring up at him.
    “ Why are you filling up my time with these fakers?” she asked.
    “ Fakers?” Merv looked hurt, and the hurt looked almost genuine. “You see this second number here?”
    He pointed to the folded scrap of paper on the desk.
    “ Yeah?” she said.
    He leaned in and whispered loud enough to be heard two desks away, “You should ask them about fakers.”
    Kaneko returned his dramatic whisper with one of