One message remains, p.1
One Message Remains, page 1
ONE MESSAGE REMAINS
“Premee Mohamed sends her readers once more unto the breach with her stunning stories and I for one am sure to follow wherever she leads the charge. The battlefield has never been more breathtaking, where the horrors of war go beyond the borders of our own world, explored with such probing, insightful prose.”
—Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes
“Nebula award winner Mohamed delivers more science-infused, dystopian speculative fiction in this hard-hitting collection of four interlinked stories.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Premee Mohamed is one of speculative fiction’s greatest authors, and this collection provides further proof.”
—Chuck Wendig
“Premee Mohamed is one of Canada’s most exciting thinkers and writers of speculative fiction. Her stories bravely go where few dare to, each employing a deftness of language and surety of form that offers a fresh experience each time. One Message Remains and the stories within are no exception, each tale different from the other, yet all very much quintessential Premee stories. Readers of her works, long and short both, will find much to love here.”
—Suyi Davies Okungbowa
“Nobody writes like Premee Mohamed, with justice on one shoulder and compassion on the other, and a pen that dances over the page. In One Message Remains, she draws different voices and perspectives to the fore like a conductor of a small and beautifully crafted symphony, in a minor key.”
—Kate Heartfield, Aurora Award winner and author of The Tapestry of Time
“Mohamed has given us an incisive collection that unflinchingly dissects the brutal clockwork mechanism behind colonialism and the very real, flesh and blood people who are caught within its cogs. Beautifully penned, insightful and honest in it’s portrayal of resistance, this is exactly the brave kind of anticolonial work we need now more than ever.”
—Suzan Palumbo author of Countess and Skin Thief Stories
“Gallows creak, the perished whisper, and death herself watches from the audience. On stages, on the run, and in graves, people try to find ways of resisting the oppression that has controlled them for so long. A beautiful collection of stories with prose that sings until your very bones resonate with their melody.”
—Steve Toase, author of Dirt Upon My Skin and To Drown in Dark Water
“An established master of short fiction, Mohamed brings her typical clarity and assurance to a new—but desperately familiar–world haunted by violence, empire, ghosts, and devils. These are simply some of the most human and humane stories I’ve ever read.”
—Alix E. Harrow, Hugo-Award Winner and New York Times Bestselling author
THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST
“Written with the deft hands of a master, this is a tale for anyone who loves an ancient cursed forest (including us, Team Premee), a take-no-shit protagonist (also us), and exciting, inventive magic (you guessed it—we love that shit).”
—Reactor Magazine
“Heart-breaking and fear-striking, this book will catch you up in its claws and wring you out, all in the best possible way!”
—The Library Ladies
THE RIDER, THE RIDE, THE RICH MAN’S WIFE
“Wonderfully textured, and both chilling and heartening in equal measure.”
—Mike Brooks, author of The God-King Chronicles
“A beautiful fever-dream of a story, about family, friendship, and fear.”
—Laura Anne Gilman, award-winning author of the Devil’s West series
ONE
MESSAGE
REMAINS
PREMEE MOHAMED
ONE MESSAGE REMAINS
© 2025 Premee Mohamed
All Rights Reserved.
ISBN-13: 979-8-89116-010-1
Published by Psychopomp
psychopomp.com
Publisher’s Note:
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mohamed, Premee, author.
Title: One Message Remains
Description: Woodbury, VT : Psychopomp [2025]
Identifiers: ISBN: 9798891160101 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction. |
BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / General.
Cover & interior formatted by Christine M. Scott
clevercrow.com
Cover illustration by John G. Reinhart
ONE MESSAGE REMAINS
My dearest wife,
Major Lyell Tzajos frowned at his letter, if you could refer to it as such at this stage of development. So far it was just a salutation. And a slightly awkward one, no? At home, he didn’t call her “wife” any more than she called him “husband.” He crossed it out and wrote below it:
Dear Mariye,
Then he paused again, the pencil-tip resting against the gridded paper of his army-issued notebook. Something in her last letter had angered him, something he wanted to refute at once, but he had mistakenly left the letter back at headquarters six weeks ago. He shifted uncomfortably on the low equipment chest on which he had unwisely chosen to rest, the cold metal draining heat through his trousers, and stared out at the horizon, or where he thought it probably was; here, it was rarely a line dividing earth and sky, only a place where the fog changed color, like partly wetted paper. Ah! Now he remembered.
He wrote,
Of course our mission is not a punishment. Where did you get such a scurrilous idea, and why are you repeating it to me like any town gossip? If it was from the Tribune, then I order you to cancel our subscription to that rag at once. I have had enough of letting you “sweet-talk” me into allowing you to keep it. It shows great disrespect. Our mission happens to be an honor. For the sake of accuracy, allow me to clarify what we are doing here and wh
“’Scuse me, sir.”
Tzajos looked up as his second-in-command, Captain Yather, approached in a kind of sidewise scuttle, like a land crab. Yather was a tall man at home and conspicuously tall here, and had taken to various contortions to seem less threatening. Tzajos reminded himself to have a word with the man later: it was unseemly, even if it was not technically against regulations. “Captain?”
“We got a, uh. You know. Locals.”
Tzajos accepted the pair of field glasses Yather handed him: yes, not more than fifty or so yards to the northeast of their site, a handful of figures in the fog. “Well,” he said uneasily, “I suppose there’s no law against watching us work.”
“Nossir,” said Yather.
Tzajos hated this kind of thing, hated even more that his hands were trembling as he returned the field glasses. The men were watching him now, all paused in their work, seeing what he would do. Their eyes on him like hands, reminding him of the unfriendly nudges and shoves he’d gotten last time he was in a pub in the capital, spilling his drink. Oh ho ho, let’s see what the pencil-pushing little prig does now. Tzajos was a compact, tidy-looking man, well within the acceptable height and weight range for the draft, but something about him made him seem not only small but cropped, as if he had been trimmed to reduce even what meager portion nature had given him. The men often appended little to the jibes they thought he could not hear.
He tightened his jaw. “However,” he added, “one may infer they’ve been approaching us for some time, unseen. Therefore perhaps with hostile intent.”
“Could be, sir.”
“Take a couple of men and frighten them off, captain,” he said loudly. He did not dare look around to see the faces of the men; even the suspicion that they were laughing made him blush, which would be painfully conspicuous with his fair skin and hair. “Go on. Use the flares. Or no. Wait. Live ammunition, if you please.”
Yather hesitated, then turned to the young soldiers behind them. “All right, you lot, tools down a mo.’ Volunteers? Yes, you’ll do. With me.”
In mere moments, the three men were immersed in the fog, invisible, their footsteps silent on the grass. Tzajos held his breath and hated himself for it: a silly little man, yes, just as they muttered under their breaths, a silly little posh prig with a la-dee-dah accent and a fussy little mustache who had no right to command this mission... He swallowed, flinched, rammed his hands into his trouser pockets as the flares went off, even though he had approved their use.
A crackling roar from the tiny cartridges, magnified and deepened by the fog. A sphere of pink light. The sound of unseen birds winging away. Then faint shouting, and a couple of small-caliber reports. As always, even the sound of the guns made him feel light-headed. He had no idea how he had survived basic training. How long ago it seemed, five years, the start of the war...
Yather and the two privates returned, squelching across the wet turf. “Drove ’em off, sir. No contact. Had the men fire into the air.
“Thank you, Yather.” Tzajos raised his voice for the benefit of the others and added, “No harm done if you had though, eh? Dragonish hides as they’ve all got?”
No one laughed. Tzajos had heard the men make a variation on this joke a thousand times since they’d started; what had he gotten wrong? He swallowed again, hearing his throat click, and added, “Right. Well. Are we...are we ready to proceed again?”
“Mule’s workin’ again, sir,” someone called—one of the mechanics, spackled in grey mud from head to toe, like a gargoyle. The Mule was what the men called their temperamental pneumatic excavator, since enlisted men (Tzajos had begun to realize) gave a nickname to everything from their mess kits to local landmarks. He, meanwhile, stubbornly continued to refer to it using its asset name.
“Very well,” Tzajos said over the rattling hiss of the engine getting up to steam. “Permission to resume.” That was the mission plan, that kept things organized and efficient, he had drawn it up himself: one sector opened up as the next was recovered, followed by closure concomitant with the next sector being opened up. No idleness, every man-hour accounted for! They were not in this foreign land on holiday!
Tzajos looked around for the Teleplasm Recovery Unit in its heavy brass case, finally locating it next to the excavator, also covered in mud. “Private! What is the meaning of this?”
The mechanic wriggled out of the coal compartment and made an effort to clean his face somewhat. “Sir?”
“The recovery unit.”
“Oh! Well, she were acting up last night, sir, so I gave ’er a check this morning—”
“What was the issue specifically? Did you complete the formal inspection checklist?”
The mechanic frowned, mud flaking from his forehead. “No sir, on account of that’s an official task of which I myself was not assigned to do.”
“Then why did you ‘give it a check,’ private?”
“She...she were acting up. Can’t have things acting up.”
Tzajos picked up the case, grimacing at the filthy handle. He would never understand these men, never. What was the compulsion to simply fiddle about with things unless you had official orders? You could be written up for that. He himself tried to model ideal military behavior, never as much as touching the equipment unless it was part of the mission plan.
Somehow the fog had grown even thicker; visibility was down to a few paces. Tzajos slid his boots rather than walking as he neared the excavation, letting it appear gradually, its edges claggy, grey, more like cement than soil. Next to it lay the cut turf they had rolled up like a medieval manuscript, ornamented appropriately with wildflowers, sprouting herbs, the grasping white fingers of roots. Remarkable, really. The tenacity. How anything managed to grow in this stuff. Bit like the people.
Tzajos set the unit down carefully, grateful to be relieved of the burden, grateful also that over a month and a half of constantly hauling it around (as the commanding officer, he was the only one approved to use it) he no longer grunted or whimpered when lifting it. He did not feel materially stronger, but something had been quietly compensating in his arms or back, and he thanked it. Bone gleamed out of the muck, first revealed then polished by the Mule’s pressurized hydro-vacuum hoses. A successful find; but as this corroborated the official sector map he had been using, he felt vindicated rather than gratified to see it confirmed.
“Mark it,” he said to Yather. The captain dug the map out of his satchel and squatted on his haunches, head still level with Tzajos’s ribcage, and glanced around for the bright red flags of their distance markers. Very good; Tzajos had stressed upon all the men the importance of those markers, of placing them deeply in the turf, and it seemed to have sunk in at last. You had to be precise. No sense doing half a job.
“Marked,” Yather said, showing his notebook page.
“Thank you. Right. Distance, please.” Tzajos stooped next to the excavation, opened the case, activated the device, and waited as the internal engine hummed up to pressure. It sounded all right; what had the private been talking about? Perhaps slightly rougher than usual, but it was barely perceptible and might easily have been a result of sitting there in the mud, instead of its elevated leather frame. Hmm. Maybe he should write the man up, after all. It would be a lesson to the rest of them.
When the indicator needle hovered at fifty pounds per square inch, Tzajos flipped the switch and held the funnel steady as whatever remained of the dead men’s teleplasm rose from the bones, entering the collector receptacle in a thin violet fog. Strange to look at it, see it the same as our own, isn’t it. You’d think it would look different. But then, so many peoples of the world. Maybe not enough colors to cover them all. Or not able to perceive the difference...well, the army tested you for color vision before you could join, and—
Tzajos did not hear the bang, only the echoes of it returning to him muffled and soft in the fog, and he did not see the flash, only feel its dazzling imprint as he blinked again and again, unable to stop his eyes trying to recover their vision. Gradually he became aware of Yather pulling him up, calling his name.
“I’m all right, I... What happened?”
“Not sure, sir. Sounded like one of them stunners went off, except smaller. Like a cherry-bomb.”
Tzajos rubbed his left ear, which was still ringing. Fortunately he had dropped the recovery unit at the edge of the excavation instead of into it; the unit did not seem to have sustained any damage, and indeed was still running. He picked it up, wary of a repeat of whatever had happened, but the indicators appeared normal and even the engine sounded normal now. Perhaps it had not been the unit at all; perhaps he had simply had a funny turn and blamed it on the thing.
Right on schedule, the status light turned from amber to green, and it unceremoniously jettisoned the sealed cube of teleplasm from the nacelle, which Tzajos was used to by now, catching it deftly before it fell into the hole. He labelled it with a grease-pencil and put it in his satchel, hearing the celluloid edges clunk dully against the others collected this morning before the Mule had broken down. A bag full of achievements, each carrying him closer to the end of the mission, to promotion, celebration, veneration.
“Effects, sir,” said one of the privates inside the hole, handing Tzajos a black bag. He accepted the cold, sodden package between thumb and forefinger, and murmured something about getting back on schedule.
With practiced distaste, he ungimmicked the complicated ties and folds, opening the thick oiled leather to reveal a mass of papers barely damp on their edges. This too no longer surprised him; nearly all of the dead soldiers had been buried with journals, letters, books, pocket watches, and rings in bags like this—things that any reasonable man would have insisted be sent to their families postmortem. Instead the dead clutched them tight, in graves so shallow that any passing wildlife could easily root them up and scatter their remains. A beastly practice in every definition, Tzajos thought. Like dogs burying a bone six inches down, uncaring of what happens to it next, because dogs don’t know what a future is or how to think about it. At least they hadn’t been in mass graves, as everyone had expected.
At any rate, as the commanding officer, it was his responsibility to ensure everything was read, cataloged, preserved, and transported back to headquarters in order to correctly match physical and teleplasmic remains to names of the dead. The burden of superiority!
He opened the topmost item, a thin green notebook like the kind given to schoolchildren, and glanced at the first line in its clumsily curled printing—They say the havuvara have weapons that the world has never even HEARD of—then put it back in the bag. More efficient to batch everything together and read it all at once after the day’s work was done, as he usually did.
