by eden Hudson
“How’d that prank on the old fisher go?” I asked, watching her face for a reaction to me bringing up the catfish skull.
Her lazy smile never flickered. “Don’t you worry ’bout me. I get my licks in.” Her pale blue eyes slid over to Nick, taking him in from head to toe. “I’m gonna have to get you a punch card. Bring me four more friends and your next visit’s free.”
Nick glanced at me, but I left him to figure out that she meant some old-fashioned type of customer loyalty incentive from the context and addressed Re Suli instead.
“Why don’t you have a wristpiece?”
She put her hand on her hip and cocked her body. “Why should I?”
“To pay for things,” I said.
“I find most folks are willin’ to barter.” The witch adjusted the wide headband in her crazy hair. “If’n you know their currency.”
“To look up information, then.”
“When I wanna know somethin’, I go find somebody who can learn it to me.”
“Booking flights. Travel.”
She snorted. “I know where to find planes when I need them. They keep ’em at airports.”
“Talking to people,” I said.
“Can’t think a’ anybody I need to talk to that I can’t just have Het fetch to me.”
“And we can safely assume that starting your vehicle and locking your house are out.”
“Well, who’d want to break into a poor pretty little thang’s house, anyways?” she asked, grinning.
I shifted feet. The wristpiece had been invented more than two hundred years ago, and since evolved from a tiny, irritating strip of fake leather with a screen the size of your thumbnail and a battery that had to be replaced every year to the biothermal charging, four-inch ultra-def screens on the Comfort Geloam bands that we have today. They’re an essential part of life in the Revived Earth. You can’t get anything done without one.
Unless you had been born in a time when no one had had them and you refused to adapt.
“How old were you when the wristpiece was invented?” I asked.
Re Suli frowned. “Boy, you sure didn’t get yer daddy’s manners.”
“And every woman I’ve ever met is welcome,” I said. “Did you used to have a wristpiece? Try out that newfangled tech, but realize you couldn’t turn it on without help from your grandkids?”
“This joke’s gettin’ less and less funny,” she said.
Beside me, Nick took a step forward. “What does any of this have to do with anything? Just ask her about Marinette.”
“Nick, if you can’t shut yourself up, I’ll do it for you.” I turned my attention back to the witch. “We know you use a fourths leech to siphon off the years and stay young. What we want to know is whether your age is the reason you don’t wear a wristpiece.”
“Seems to me that y’all come here wantin’ secrets, but not wantin’ to pay. You, I can excuse,” the witch said to Nick. Then she pointed one long-nailed finger at me. “But you oughta know better.”
“What’s your currency today?” I asked her.
“Same’s always.” She shrugged one shoulder. “Blood, reproductive matter, or firstborn flesh.”
“Or sentiment offerings,” I said.
She tapped her finger on her lips. “Naw, those always seem to go missin’ around you.”
“Look, ma’am,” Nick said, obviously in dire need of a throat pin, “we’re trying to find a witch—I mean, a vocor—named Marinette who doesn’t wear a wristpiece. That’s why he’s asking about it. She’s got something that belongs to me and I want it back. I don’t want to spread around my reproductive matter or share any part of my firstborn, but I’ve got blood to spare if you can tell us how to find her.”
I rolled my eyes. With vague wording like that, Re Suli could take a gallon of Nick’s blood and tell him, How you find her is…look for her! Har har har! Nickie-boy proving once again that he was the kind of guy who got cheated out of a piece of his soul.
The Courten witch studied Nick’s face. Several seconds passed with only the ubiquitous buzzing of bugs and the breeze sighing through the rainforest canopy.
“You got what they call hyperoxygenated blood?” she asked, scratching absently at the spot just above her perfect little cup of a navel. “The fancy kind they make up in Emdoni babies nowadays?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nick said.
“Yeah, nowadays being the last ninety years,” I said so she would know I was filing that under my list of age-relative facts about her.
“Well, I figure I can use it, anyway,” she said, reaching out to Nick to shake on the deal.
Nick closed his massive paw over her tiny hand. Then he sucked in a breath and jerked away as if he’d grabbed a salamander out of the coals.
A drop of red-purple blood rolled off the tip of his middle finger. While it was still in freefall, Re Suli snatched it out of the air. She held her palm up to the bright morning sunlight to inspect the splatter.
“Yep, this’ll do just fine.” She turned and hustled into her little shack, calling over her shoulder, “Be right back. Y’all be good, now.”
Nick stuck the tip of his injured finger into his mouth.
I took a couple steps away from him. I didn’t know what witches could do with blood, but I didn’t want to be crushed if he suddenly dropped dead from it.
When Re Suli came back, she had a glass vial in one hand and bit of bone tied to the end of a string in the other.
“Lemme see yer finger,” she said.
Nick held his huge hand out. She took his finger and popped it in her mouth, sucking on it like a horny chick with an incurable oral fixation. Nick shifted uncomfortably—probably trying to dislodge a chub that had gotten caught at an awkward angle—but didn’t pull away.
After a few seconds’ worth of phalangeal fellatio, the witch pulled Nick’s finger back out with a wet pop.
“There.” She glanced up at the sun. “That oughta hold at least ’til noontime.”
“Hold what?” Nick asked.
She put the vial to Nick’s bleeding finger and squeezed the tip. Blood welled up and dripped into the vial.
“You can’t be made to attack somebody who’s got a piece of you inside them,” she said, watching the vial. “This vocor took out a piece’a yer soul, right? That’s why you’re so splintery. Holding onto a bit of the soul gives them control over a human—which, as you can imagine, is a lot safer than tryin’ to control a demon. They can walk you around like a meat puppet, murderin’ and rapin’ as you go if’n they want, but they can’t make you attack yourself. The soul won’t do it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The witch turned a flat look on me. “You didn’t pay for nothin’, so you don’t get nothin’.”
“Why not?” Nick repeated.
“A soul recognizes its own body, don’t it?” She laughed. “Honestly, don’t you people know anythin’?”
“I don’t,” Nick said. “But I’d like to fix that.”
“Then you brung the right attitude.” She cocked her head to get a better angle on the vial as Nick’s blood dripped into it. “It helps if’n you think of yer body like a soul house. Yer soul’s eternal. To be here on earth, where everythang’s temporary, it’s got to have a dwelling that’s temporary, too. But if yer body’s destroyed, the soul either has to move somewheres else or go home to eternity. Yer soul can decide it’s done here and blow its body’s head off, but somebody else’s soul can’t make that decision for it. They can’t make yer soul harm its body without its consent. ’Course, they can make yer body destroy everythang and everybody you love ’til yer soul wants to kill its body. But that’s loophole work.”
Nick nodded, doing a passable job of pretending that he understood. “Because every soul has free will and autonomous choice.”
“You got it.” Re Suli took the half-full vial away from his finger, held it up to the sun, and shook it.
“The blood you swallowed protects you in ca
se Marinette sends me on a rampage or specifically orders me to kill you,” Nick said. “But if I decided of my own free will to kill myself, then I could kill the both of us and the blood you swallowed wouldn’t stop me.”
The fix-it witch flapped one pale hand at Nick. “Oh, honey, you wouldn’t stand a chance. I only did the blood work ’cause I just woke up, and I don’t feel like gettin’ into a tussle with some ol’ bitch’s meat puppet right yet. Not if I can avoid it, leastways.”
Nick’s thin lips twitched into something like a smile. “I hate to get into a fight right out of bed, too. So, what about this vocor? Any idea where I might find her?”
“I like you, cutie, so I’m gonna tell you right now, that question’s a waste of yer money.” She stoppered the vial and stuck it in the pocket of her cutoffs. “C’mon.”
Re Suli went to an ash pile near the door of her shack. Nick followed.
“Here.” She picked up his hand again and tied the string with the bone on the end to the tip of his bleeding finger. “Hold that up.”
“Like this?” He held it out about chest-high, letting the bone dangle and swing on the end.
“Not quite.” She adjusted his arm lower and lower until the bone just barely touched the ashes. “There we go.”
As the bone drifted with the breeze and jumped with every thud of Nick’s pulse in his fat finger, it scrawled faint lines in the ash. Nick was quiet for so long that I wondered if he’d been hypnotized by the bone’s movement. I was about to ask the obvious question—not because I expected Re Suli to answer me, but because then it would clue Nick in to what he should be asking—but he spoke up as I was opening my mouth.
“So, what’s the question I should be asking?” He glanced up from the bone to the witch. “To get my money’s worth?”
She grinned. “What you oughta be askin’ is what to do once you find the right soul jar.”
“All right,” Nick said. “What do I do once I find the soul jar?”
“The right soul jar,” she said. “You don’t want a piece a’ somebody else’s stanky ol’ soul.”
“Once I find the right one,” he amended.
Re Suli squatted next to the ashes and inspected the bone drawing. “We’ll let that cook a mite longer.” She stood again. “When you find the right soul jar, the first thing you’ll think is, ‘I oughta smash this and set my soul free.’ But all that’ll do is damage it worse and you might even lose the dang thing. What you want to do is be gentle. Open the lid, coax it out with some nice, quiet words—it’s gonna be afraid, remember, after all that’s been done to it—then tip it real soft into your mouth and swallow it down. Should grow back together good as new within a new moon.”
Nick nodded. “That’s what I’ll do, then.”
“Done.” She plucked the bone straight up from the ashes by its string. “Let’s have a look-see.”
The witch knelt on the dirt and beckoned Nick down beside her. I joined them because it was my idea to come here in the first place, and I don’t like to be left out.
“Yep. See there?” Re Suli pointed at a scattering of dots and straight lines. “That’s the workin’ she done up on you, the soul trap. That there—” She indicated swirls and swooshes. “—that’s her. Y’all ain’t messin’ with no silly gang girl gone wild. She got old power. Older’n mine by a sight. Me, I could maybe take her. Maybe. Y’all…” She shrugged and her baggy top slid down one creamy shoulder.
My scalp tingled. Images of Nick burning to a crisp in a hail of magefire and sliced in half by ghostblades flashed through my head. I tried to help him, I would tell Carina when I brought what was left of Nick back to her in a lunchbox. The vocor was just too powerful. If he hadn’t made this deal thinking he could bring you back in the first place, this never would’ve happened.
Nah, I would say, If he had just trusted God in the first place… That would have a more intense emotional impact on her, really get down inside and fester—even if she knew I didn’t believe it—because it was what she would be thinking.
“This bones and ash show is cute and all,” I said. “I’m sure you really impress the tourists with it. But your deal was that you’d take a bit of Nick’s blood in exchange for telling him how to find this vocor, not telling him how powerful she is or what to do with a soul jar.”
The witch glared at me.
“I don’t want to be an asshole,” Nick said, “but the asshole’s right. It would really help us to know where we can find her.”
Re Suli patted Nick’s tree-trunk forearm and smiled. “Don’t you fret none, sugar, I ain’t mad at you. Some folks just go talkin’ about deals who don’t know how to keep a deal theirselves.” She stuck a pale finger in the ashes and made a circle around some of the dots and swipes the bone had made. “That there means yer gal likes a good time. Me, I like a good time, too, but I like to have mine out here by myself or on a crick bank with a fishin’ pole. Yer gal likes gamblin’, drinkin’, smokin’, fightin’, loud crowds, and plenty of bleedin’. Somewheres she can see a soul leave a body. Get ’em all together and you’ll find her smack-dab in the middle of it.”
When we stood up to go, Nick held out his gigantic paw to the witch to shake again.
“Thanks for helping us out,” he said. “I really do appreciate it.”
“Don’t even think on it.” Re Suli grabbed his huge hand in her tiny one, turned it over, and brushed a chivalrous kiss across his huge scarred knuckles.
Nick smiled in a way that said he wasn’t sure whether to be amused or creeped out, but he didn’t pull away until she let go.
The witch cocked an eyebrow at me. “Do I gotta make you turn out yer pockets?”
I threw my head back and cackled. “If I lifted something while you were standing right there, I wouldn’t keep it in my pocket.”
That made her laugh. She stuck her thumbs in the empty belt loops of her cutoffs, jutting out her creamy tummy, hips, and breasts.
“You come on back when it gets to be too much, now,” she told me. “I mean that. I’ll learn you something real neat. Just make sure you bring me a pretty present next time to make up for them sentiment offerings you took or I’ll turn you into a fetch-it-to-me like Het.”
SEVEN:
Carina
Carina fell three more times—twice on the pole next to Miyo’s house, once on a much longer jump between two houses close to the objective—and had to start over on the porch. But as she went, she felt herself becoming accustomed to the flesher way of traveling through the village. She spotted the pitfalls before she fell into them and adjusted her technique midstride.
The trick to poling, she learned, was momentum over grasp. Rather than wrap her fingers around the pole like she would’ve done in real life, she had to wrap her upper arm around the pole for stability and squeeze her thighs together for hold. As the pole leaned over to the next house, she allowed herself to spin around to the other side of the pole. When she was within reach, she let go and let momentum drop her onto the porch.
On her fourth run, Carina made it to the edge of the village without falling. She joined the other young women and children looking down from the treetop porches.
You made it, Miyo! No time for celebration! There’s your father!
The rumble of waterbikes filled the air.
Down below, flesher men drove into the village, towing ropes that led to wet, mud-splattered, and beaten men and women slogging along behind. Teenage boys circled the group, herding the new slaves like cattle. Pity and indignation roared in Miyo’s ears like rushing blood, but Carina kept the girl’s expression neutral.
Carina looked for identifying marks to see which real-world tribes the fleshers had raided—they seemed to be a generic amalgam of the salamander-wearers and the fishing people—but Miyo’s eyes caught on something else.
At the head of the raiders’ formation was a man with black hair flecked with white and silver. Barrel-chested, sun-darkened, and proud. In spite of her feelings about the
slaves, Miyo’s heart flared with love at the sight of her father, Unan.
What Miyo’s emotions lacked, Carina’s own filled in. Her father, Sir Cormac, had been dead for almost two years now, but the ache still flared up at unexpected intervals, empty and gnawing.
How did this moment feel for someone like Van Zandt? She’d never gotten a straight answer out of him about his father, but she gathered the relationship had been complicated at best. Did that out-of-game mental rejection kick in the first time Van Zandt felt Miyo’s love clash with whatever he felt about his father? Or had it been a moment of escape, a chance to experience emotions completely foreign to his world?
Carina shook off the momentary distraction, and with it, the pang of sympathy for the little boy that Van Zandt must’ve been.
The women of the village slid down the bamboo poles to the swamp to meet their men. Miyo’s father, Unan, looked up at her expectantly.
The translucent lettering appeared again.
Showtime, Miyo! As the best flesher in Tsunami Tsity and the daughter of the wealthiest man in the village, you’re expected to start the flaying.
Objective: Take 1 slave from your father’s raiding party and hang it from your flaying hook.
A sparkling light flashed below. None of the other fleshers seemed to notice it, but a tiny cloud of glitter hovered over a platform built just above the waterline using the nearby tree roots for support. Dangling over the platform was a heavy-duty steel gambrel on a long cable—obviously what the game was calling a flaying hook. A pulley system had been rigged up so that the gambrel could be raised and lowered from the platform. Other platforms set up in similar fashion were scattered around the perimeter of the village, all weathered and stained with blood visible even from this distance.
Miyo’s stomach rebelled at the sight.
The lettering popped back up.
Persistent Gore settings cannot be changed in Story Mode.
As soon as that reminder faded, a new one took its place.
The sight of blood makes you woozy.
Penalty: -1 to Speed, -1 to Dexterity, -1 to Perception