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horrors .
    I flinched. The voice had come from beside me. There was no one there . . . Wait, there was. An impression, faint, flickering, like a smudge of the light. Now I could see her: the primitive face, the short figure, her skin cast in a blue shimmer, hair black, dress maroon. She wore a necklace with a tiger carved out of soapstone, her waist and forehead adorned by strings of hammered copper and turquoise, ruby, and jade.
    The siren.
    “You,” I said. “You still exist.”
    She shimmered like a projection, her amber eyes overlaying the horizon. I have existed since the beginning. And I would visit you more, but it takes a great effort to reach you , she said, even briefly .
    “I mean you’re still in my head, or whatever.”
    Not in your head . She raised a finger and pointed at me. The finger neared my chest and flicked through my shirt and skin. I felt a light burning there. In you .
    “What does that mean?”
    The siren just turned back to the body on the flagpole.
    I followed her gaze. “Do you know who did this?”
    It is a sign , she said. A warning .
    “From who?”
    “Who” does not matter. “When” is the key. It is the way of things that each cycle comes to an end; order and intention dissolve; Qi and An become estranged, their harmony lost. This discord unleashes horrors. But it is also the way of things that balance returns, and the cycle starts anew .
    “You aren’t making sense,” I said. Then I wondered if the siren might get mad at that, but I was tired of hearing all these cryptic statements.
    Yet when she looked at me again she seemed to smile. When the music of the Terra is lost, they create gods to give voice to the darkness. But these gods know only what humans know. What is of this earth cannot control it, and thus the horrors are unleashed .
    Her voice grew louder in my mind, crowding out my other senses. You must beware the gods and their horrors .
    The words burned into my brain, and I thought, I will . I felt a moment of weightless being, and then realized my eyes were closed. I had become totally still. I’d even stopped breathing. I opened my eyes. The siren was gone.
    The moment of stillness seemed to have brushed away a layer of static, as if my senses had been cleaned. As the world bled back in, I felt the breeze between the hairs of my arms, felt the sharp, probing heat of the sun on my head. I smelled the dry baked earth, but something else too. Something slightly sour and metallic . . .
    And there was a noise. A low hum that I hadn’t noticed before. Droning, with an occasional dip in pitch. It got louder as a gust of wind billowed against my face. The smell got stronger too. Coming from ahead of me.
    I peered at the body, and stepped closer to the edge of the roof. As I neared, I saw a blurry movement around the limbs. The drone increased. Another waft of acrid odor hit me. I knew the sound now, and saw the source.
    What I had thought were black stains were flies. Thousands of flies. They were whirling in orbit around the corpse. Its arms and legs were alive with their crawling, a rippling layer of black bodies and vibrating wings.
    Tiny flashes caught my eye. Little movements, not the flies, but instead glints of light that seemed to fall away from the body toward the ground.
    I peered over the edge of the roof, all the way to the concrete. There was a shimmery light at the base of the flagpole. It was different from the flat light of sun on sand. This was a reflection on liquid. Water? No, beneath the surface sheen, the substance was too dark, too opaque.
    I took a deep breath and had a hard time filling my lungs around my galloping heart. I looked back up. Saw a flash and followed another little light trail. It was the reflection off a droplet. It plinked into the puddle below.
    A puddle of blood.
    And even though I knew exactly what this meant, everything it meant—it was hitting me like blows to the chest—I just kept standing there staring. . . .
    Blood