The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine by Jason Sizemore Page A

floor and her face looked slack and peaceful,
all the tension, the concern, the confusion drained out of her. I blinked,
trying to get my bearings. One of the medical monitors was screaming, a howling
alarm to warn us that the man on the trolley had arrested, his heart failing,
the remaining blood draining out through the gaping hole in his throat. I
turned to Isabella; shook her gently to rouse her. She remained still.
Confused, I looked her up and down. Then I saw it: the scalpel sticking out of
her chest, surrounded by a growing Mandelbrot of blood. It was stark and red
against the clean white of her lab coat. The knife had struck her straight
through the heart, like a stake, so forceful in the fall that it had buried
itself almost halfway along its shaft. I fumbled, unsure whether to pull it out
or not. My mind went completely blank. I became aware of a terrible, animal
keening sound and, for a moment, thought the clone on the trolley was still
alive before I realized that the sound was coming from me.
    I gathered Isabella up in my
arms, rocking her from side to side, telling her everything was going to be
okay. Only, in truth, I knew that was not the case. She was already dead, and,
in more ways than one, so was I.
     
    There was no panic, no call to
the police. For some time I sat with Isabella, the world in tattered shreds
around me, the red ruin of the laboratory and the spilt blood a mockery of
everything her life had been. I couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done to me,
her strange, exotic form of vampirism. She had taken the very essence of what I
was and toyed with it, made it something alien, turned it into something it was
never intended to be. But all the same, I never wanted this . I smoothed
her hair back from her face, closed her eyelids with my fingertips.
    After a while, sitting there in
stunned silence, the sounds of the medical equipment still loud and insistent
around me, my remorse began to give way to a strange kind of shocked relief.
There was a sense of peace, of closure. It was over. At least, this way, I had
my answer.
    In a haze, still numb from the
shock, I took the corpse from the trolley, disconnecting the myriad pipes and
wires, and laid it beside her on the laboratory floor. Then, after cleaning
myself up as best I could, I fled the house, leaving the two of them together,
peaceful, as if sleeping. I hoped they were happy in their dreams.
    Outside, night had fallen and
the world existed only in the impassionate glow of the streetlamps. I made my
way back to the car. Behind me, the house was silent, still.
    I dropped my jacket onto the
passenger seat, running a hand over my face. I clambered into the driver’s
seat. My heart was pounding in my chest. I looked back at the house, thinking
of her there, in the lab, her eyes tired and glazed, her smile fixed and
unmoving. It was as if there had been only one inevitable outcome of our dark
and passionate affair, only one possible resolution, and there had been nothing
I could have done to stop it. Now, finally, it was over.
    I knew the police wouldn’t come
looking for me; as far as their forensic tests would show, I was dead, lying on
the floor beside my lover, murdered in bizarre circumstances, in a strange
laboratory at the back of an old house. The clone and I had changed places,
adopted each other’s roles. Now, like him, I was new to the world. A world
without Isabella. Somehow I had to find my place in it, had to start again. I
had no idea where to even begin.
    I turned over the car engine
and crawled slowly away from the curb. I could hear Isabella’s voice, echoing
around in my thoughts:
    “Sometimes it just
feels like the whole world is conspiring against you, and you only wish you
could step back for a moment to take a breath.”
    A moment later, I flashed the
car headlamps at a pedestrian making his lonely way home, and moved off into
the anonymity of the night.
     

Scenting the Dark
    Mary Robinette Kowal
     
    Lifting the