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The Ones Who Stay and Fight - Lightspeed Magazine

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PUBLISHED IN JAN. 2020 (ISSUE 116) | 3829 WORDS © 2018 by N. K. Jemisin. Originally published in How Long Til Black Future Month. Reprinted by permission of the author. It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds—a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass—made for this day, and flown on no other!—waft and buzz on the wind. Even the monorail cars trail stylized flamingo feathers from their rooftops, although these are made of featherglass, too, since real flamingos do not fly at the speed of sound. Um-Helat sits at the confluence of three rivers and an ocean. This places it within the migratory path of several species of but

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