9 July, 1886 CE

Abyssinian Lowlands

Artemis lay her head on the heaving side of the elephant. The animal was a large female, eighteen or nineteen years old. The small watery eye searched frantically for the calf that had never been far from her side. The calf and the rest of the herd had fled.

2 July, 1937 CE

Pacific Ocean

This was like no cloud cover, fog or mist she’d ever flown through before. The needles of every gauge juttered, never settling in on a reading. She wondered how low they really were, wondered if the rush across her belly was a mirror response to the belly of the plane. It had happened before . . . the two bodies riveted together out of aluminum and human skin.

Chaos

Men name wars to pin them to paper, fold them up, tuck madness and destruction into a pocket. Forget. Never forget. Gain distance. Relive it. Blame. Ask forgiveness. Tidy up chaos into sentences and chapters. A title. A timeline. Statistics.

True chaos, khaos, cannot be scribed into dots and lines. No. Your people have forgotten that khaos is the void, the abyss.

7 June, 1941 CE

Oxford, England

"Lady Harris?" She heard the words as if she was far under water. The name drifted past, paling to an echo. She barely recognized herself by that name, or any other these days. Cold washed over the exposed skin on her arms and she instinctively drew the cape closer around her. It was more a work of art than a garment.

31 May, 1942 CE

Oxford

Floats. Water. Wings. These words tumbled together in Charlotte’s head coming to rest at the gate to her memories on the bank of the Thames. The gates opened with a click and the words rearranged into a vision of the ghost plane drifting silently past the girl and the tree. More memories came spooling out, some Charlotte couldn’t understand, didn’t recognize as her own. She sat very still while her insides whirled like a crazed carousel.

May, 1945 CE

The Village of Ash

Once there was a story and no one to tell it.

As Grandmother spoke, the girl settled herself closer; the pair were excused from the work of women and girls in their village lest their strangeness spoil the bubbling disks of injera as they baked or taint the healing essence of the plants hanged to dry in the African sun.

“Tell about the tree and the bird and the girl by the sea,” Asmeret begged.

9 July, 1960 CE

Tree, on the Red Sea

Once a year she startled awake, gasping for breath. Reached for him as he slipped away. Wait! Wait.

When she was younger, Asmeret could still see his blue-black-blue face, the color of the ancient kings and queens of their tribe. Smell the blood of their mother on him. Hear his breath. Feel his heartbeat next to hers as it had been for the time in their mother’s womb and the no-time in the no-place before that.

June, 1949 CE

The Village of Ash

“Don’t encourage her,” Arsema snapped.

Bilen and the other Parrot Girls clung to each other under the thorn tree where they preened in the shade. They screeched in mock terror whenever Asmeret stopped running in circles to bare her teeth and snap at them with that weird grin on her face.

NEXT

What came next is this.

Asmeret stared at the card in her hand; curls of blonde hair escaping the helmet, intelligent blue-gray eyes full of questions. Eyes, she realized, that couldn’t see her, though they seemed to try. Asmeret looked from Athena to Hestia. Then to the wisp she understood was her grandmother, now an ancestor.