My Soul, and With the Sun
by Duke Kimball The new gods are dead. Their corpses shine down on the streets of Chicago, watching; waiting for something, anything, to move. Wiklund doesn’t look up. He skulks along the rooftops, too-tight black hoodie pulled up to shadow the faint lavender glow of his searching eyes. He moves quickly, and with purpose, hiding his face from the Seven Fathers. It wasn’t the Fathers themselves you had to worry about, of course. Slinging their way around the earth in their lifeless orbits, out of reach, hunks of rock and metal and complex laser systems crisscrossing in their choreographed sweeps. Just moons, Wiklund reckons, just moons. You don’t have to worry about the Fathers. You have to worry about what they’ll send your way. *** Betsy had taken him to the river when he was five. She’d tried to make him understand, but the process scared him. “Do I have to go all the way under?” “It ain’t strictly necessary,” Betsy admitted, begrudgingly. “But it’s how it was done in the old d
