Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2026
Lande is a nineteen-year-old woman living in a narrow mountain valley under the occupation of the Outrangers, an industrialized outside power that has built a mine deep in the valley’s sacred interior to extract dreamstones — crystalline formations that the mountains create from the sleeping minds of valley folk. Each stone holds a real dream, and once taken, it is gone forever. Every month the armored dream train passes through the villages, and residents tie themselves down while reliving the dreams stored in stones on board. Lande is mountain-touched, a term for those with a neurological difference that marks them as special but also dangerous to the Outrangers, who abduct such people. Her family has spent her entire life hiding this from the mine’s enforcers.
When the dream train passes one day, an unprecedented number of Lande’s dreamstones happen to be on board. She tears free of her anchor rope and nearly stumbles under the wheels before her sister Kuro and neighbor Grammie Day drag her to safety. The incident draws the attention of Boss Steiger, the mine’s imperious foreman, who visits with Master Dodds, the chief engineer. As an apparent act of goodwill — though with unmistakable undertones of coercion — Steiger offers Lande an apprenticeship as a mechanic, a role never before given to a valley woman. Lande, recognizing both the opportunity and the implicit threat, accepts.
She takes to the work immediately, finding in engines and locomotives an ordered, legible world free of the social ambiguities that have troubled her all her life. Master Dodds proves a complicated mentor — genuinely fond of Lande and contemptuous of his crueler colleagues, yet still a participant in a system that systematically despoils the valley. When a mechanic harasses Lande with a stolen dreamstone, Dodds intervenes dramatically, crushing the stone underfoot, which releases a wave of psychic energy that floors everyone in the roundhouse. His protection is real, but so are its limits.
Running alongside Lande’s working life is her relationship with Avy, her oldest friend and fellow mountain-touched, who has joined the hidden folk — a guerrilla community living in the mountains and resisting the Outrangers. Avy gave Lande an otter mask at their initiation, the animal whose ancient dreamstone Lande had touched. When Avy disappears after leading a scouting party deep into the veil — the sacred interior where Outrangers cannot safely go and where an unexplained second source of dreamstones appears to exist — Lande climbs the mountain at night to find Elder Moench, the hidden folk leader who conducted her initiation. The elder’s account of Avy’s disappearance is contradictory, and she wears a revolver that could only have come from the Outrangers. Lande refuses the elder’s offer to join the resistance, sensing something is wrong.
The story closes with Lande convinced that the mountains themselves have guided her — through the cascade of dreams on the train, through Avy’s gift of the mask — to a purpose she has not yet fully understood: to work the engines, to enter the veil, and to find her friend. (See Pt. 2)
Jason Sanford is an award-winning author and an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born and raised in the American South, he currently lives in the Midwestern U.S. with his wife and sons. His life’s adventures include work as an archaeologist and as a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Jason has published more than a dozen of his short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone, which once devoted a special issue to his fiction. His fiction has also been published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Tales of the Unanticipated, The Mississippi Review Online, Diagram, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Pindeldyboz, and other places. Books containing his stories include multiple “year’s best” story collections along with original anthologies such as Bless Your Mechanical Heart.