Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer

precious time, a brother among brothers.
    He accepts this with certain reservations. Baba Yaga leads the march in her chicken-legged dacha, standing on the porch and waving her spoon like a general.
    What would his mother think of this? His father? If their spirits could travel from dust to dust, emerge from the mountain and see him now? Would they be proud? Would any of this surprise them? Their lost son, marching with the lost and demanding to be found again?
    Still more lost than any of them, though they can’t see it now?
    Does he still care?
----
    Yet the actual moment, when it comes, isn’t in the rain or the cold wind but on a warm, sunny day in early September that still contains hints of dying summer, the last of the green before the fire begins to turn it to gray ash. It’s a big march – nearly three hundred of them, or so the rumor goes – and there is such a sense of quiet strength among them all that even Baba Yaga ceases her cackling, though he senses that this is not out of any particular respect so much as it is that she is waiting. That the world around them is holding its breath.
    That the ground is heating under their feet.
    There are fires far below,
Baba Yaga whispered once,
that have burned for hundreds of years. Longer. There is a single great fire beneath it all that has been burning since the birth of the world.
    When the sheriff issues the call to disperse, Iwan barely hears it. It’s a voice far removed, present but ultimately not very important, and at any rate no one is dispersing. From somewhere far away there’s a scuffle, the sound of feet scrabbling and the grunt of bodies hitting bodies, but this, too, seems unimportant. Everyone around him is standing, standing like stones.
    Then. “Give two or three shots!”
    Now a murmur. Now people turning to each other, alarmed, the quiet strength drifting away like ash. And as the shots ring out, he looks to Baba Yaga and sees her grin eating up her face.
Grandmother Chaos,
he thinks.
Grandmother Fire.
And the people scatter into madness.
    It’s the spark. He can feel it. It warms him as he runs with the crowd down the muddy streets, as more shots and screams ring out, pain and anger, the sound of fighting. He looks behind and sees fallen bodies, clothes streaked with blood; he turns away again and keeps running.
    He has always been running, since he was set into motion. Now it ends.
    It comes to him that Baba Yaga has left the porch of her dacha and is on his back, riding him, beating him with her spoon like a horse. He goes where she points him, breaking away from the fleeing crowd, and isn’t surprised to find himself standing in front of the shop. Baba Yaga leaps up on his shoulders and shatters the glass of the front window with her spoon.
    The razor. The gloves. In a few seconds he has them, though now his arms are bleeding from stray shards. It feels like fair trade. If trade was even necessary; perhaps these things are his, his from the very birth of the world, like magical things waiting for him in a dragon’s cave.
    And to the dragon’s cave she is now driving him.
    He runs past the fleeing bodies in the streets, running against the flow. No one notices him or the things in his hands. Once he thinks he hears the cry of Big Mary rising over the shots and screams, and when he turns at the bottom of a little hill he sees her standing there above him, her arms raised and tears streaming down her face. She’s muddy, dirty, but somehow she is shining in the sun like a piece of cut anthracite. Their gazes meet and he knows that she sees him, and that she sees him for what he is. Their fundamental kinship.
    In this moment he has her blessing.
    Give it to the seam.
    He turns and runs again, and the shaft opens up like a mouth and swallows him.
----
    It is so very much like a story. Baba Yaga has drawn him into it, him and his true self that waits for him in the shadows. She has spun it around herself like a cloak, from coal seams and