Free Never Knew Another by J. M. McDermott

himself, surrounded by these plain, simple houses. He wondered what it was like inside those houses in the daylight. He wondered what it was like on an Adventday afternoon, sipping tea and watching the kids while the good wife sews Adventday Caps with her sisters on the back porch, and people go around visiting everyone. He imagined the scene. It all seemed so normal, but the women had no faces, and the children were just small, formless, hands running through trees and grabbing at everything.
    He tried to picture a child. Any child. He couldn’t think of even one. He tried to remember the name of Jaime’s son, in the window, but it came out all wrong—too much like Jaime drunk and smiling. He tried to think of any child in the world, and hold that child in his mind’s eye.
    He couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t feel anything. The black absence of feeling caught up inside his chest as if his heart had blackened into a stone. Jona sat down on a curb, and pressed his hands into his chest. He tried to breathe, but air wasn’t coming into his chest right. He stayed there a long time, bent over from this pain—an ache in his chest like a scream that wasn’t coming out. Not even tears came out.
    It diminished, but didn’t faded. He walked home slowly.

    ***

    My husband scoured the city, sniffing through the trash heaps for the worst of the stains among the outhouses and drinking houses and all the places Jona might have sweat out a long night. He had lived here too long. He had been in too many of the buildings here. He had walked down these roads, pissed in the alleys, and wiped sweat away everywhere he went.
    Jona was alone every night, when everyone else was dreaming. He never slept like people were supposed to sleep. He kept his heritage a secret, and he was careful about it, but it was too easy to make mistakes when he was passing among the king’s men. He kept his true self hidden, like his blood, and no one gets close.
    Jona’s life ended at the edge of his skin. This made his loneliness a broken sail that hung always on his back, windless and rain-drenched. He walked with this sail hanging over him. His shoulders rolled forward, and his eyes gazed tight into every stranger in the world. Watch out.
    That was Jona’s life, before he knew there was anyone else like him. This was before he found out about Salvatore, the immortal—I think his name is Salvatore—and before he met Rachel Nolander. This is the life he wouldn’t tell her about, under the willow tree, when she asked him.
    There wasn’t anyone else in the world like him, and he felt it deep inside, all the way back until before he was born, as the Sentas said.

    ***

    This was the life Jona knew. And then Rachel Nolander, a doppelganger’s daughter, came to Dogsland with her human half-brother.
    They came on a ship.

CHAPTER IV
    R achel came to Dogsland on a ship. I had to think hard on it. I had to be sure so my husband could tell the Church of Imam, and the guard. They needed to find the smuggler’s ship and burn it, arrest the smuggler and hang him. I had to search for every hint of her I could find in Jona’s memory. When the candle burned low, and her hand pressed into his bare chest, and the sun lingered on the western horizon and Rachel was about to get up, get dressed and slip into the night and Jona was about to get up, get dressed and slip into the night, just before then, they talked. What is your face before you are born? she had asked Jona. He could ask the same of her. Rachel had never had anyone but her brother to talk to about her life. The demon’s mark couldn’t be cut away from her skin. Her hands were human enough, with most of her arms. Her face and neck appeared human if no one noticed her tongue. Everything else was twisted from the stain. Her father was a doppelganger demon that had burrowed into the skin of Djoss’ human father. Their mother was a Senta, telling fortunes and casting small spells for coin. Rachel hid