Hath No Fury

by Melanie R. Meadors

  “I’m just here to help,” I say, which is true.

  “Then let me tell you a little story.” She reaches behind me and pulls the gun out of my belt holster, then shoves me butt-first into the nest. My back is instantly slick with egg trash, but I just lay there, waiting for her to glance away so I can grab my boot piece.

  “We were happy. And then my daughter got taken by one of the crocs, which I guess you already know. My wife left. And then things went even shittier, and I started doing all the dangerous jobs in the neighborhood. Running off the crocs, building the bridges for the kids, carrying old folks to the empty hospital. We kept waiting for the government to help us, but all the help went uptown. To Park Avenue and Tribeca and the theater district. They built barricades to trap the crocs here and shuttled their help to the rich places. We were living in a war zone, and I liked that, because it was the first thing that made me feel alive again. You got any idea what that’s like?”

  I take a deep breath. “More than you think. I need you to know—”

  “We don’t have much longer, so shut up. Now out here, we don’t have internet all the time. We barely have cell signal. There’s no money. It’s the Oregon Goddamn Trail, at least until somebody realizes we’ve got something they want.” She leans close, her gun kissing my belly. “Now by my count, you’re the third FBI chump on my turf. So, what is it we have that you want? What is it I have that you want?”

  “Just you,” I say, and it’s the truest thing I’ve told her. “What about—”

  “The mama croc? Oh, she won’t care about me once she smells you. She never does.”

  Rip backs into the corner, gun aimed at me. Her eyes almost seem to shine green like a croc’s as she watches me, cold and distant now. A giant black snout shoves out of the water and into the room, dripping mouth open a little to test the air, and I go still like thousands of prey animals before me. There’s got to be a way out of this.

  “What would your daughter think if she saw us now? What would Mrs. Gonzalez and all those children think? That you’re some sick freak watching an innocent person about to get eaten?”

  She shakes her head sadly.

  “Mamas protect their own. I failed once, and I won’t fail again. I grew up on this block. Nobody innocent would walk into this neighborhood wearing a smile. If I’m right, I’m doing my people a favor. If I’m wrong…”

  I’m an inch away from pulling my gun, just waiting for her to look away.

  “If I’m wrong, well I guess that’s one less person on my block that Mama’s gonna eat.”

  The megcroc rushes for me, and I pull my gun and fire into her open mouth, emptying the entire clip before dropping it to fumble for my phone. Zero bars. I don’t even realize I’ve been hit until I start coughing blood. I look up at Rip where she crouches on a stack of boxes, gun in hand.

  “I just wanted to help,” I sputter.

  “Yeah, but not us. Not me.”

  “Definitely you.”

  “Then you picked the wrong side.”

  Just like that, she’s gone.

  The croc’s destroyed snout is inches from my foot. I kick it weakly, but she doesn’t move. Must’ve hit her in the brain. When I look down, I see that I’m headed in a similar direction. Even if the FBI bothers to send someone in after me, they have no chance of getting a stretcher through that pipe, and I can’t get out on my own.

  I didn’t lie, though. I did want to help. They sent the first agent here to investigate Rip, a friendly visit to find out how she was able to keep the entire neighborhood operative. The second agent came looking for him and never returned. I’m number three. I wonder who they’ll send in to bat clean up and if they, too, will end up in a pile of croc crap.

  Funny thing is, I could tell them what they want to know, if I could still speak: because Rip will do whatever it takes.

  Damn. I never even got to kiss her. I did admire her. I wasn’t faking it. It wasn’t a lie.

  I reach for an egg and crush it in my hand. Another and another until I can’t move my fingers. The last thing I see is my own bloody fingers, crushing an egg.

  ..A HERO OF GRÜNJORD

  LUCY A SNYDER

  Part 1: Outlanders

  VINCA FELT HER STOMACH TWIST as the vast Outlander skyship, black as the night betwixt the stars, rose from the valley Rift. The winter sun shone harshly through wispy clouds and gleamed on the snowy mountains ringing that cursed chasm. But the ship reflected nothing. If it were not for the nauseating hum of its engines shaking her very bones, she would have thought the ship to be a catastrophic absence in the sky, like the strange, distant, invisible stars the monks argued over. “Black holes” some called them, but Vinca found that name unsatisfyingly prosaic. A hole was something to be filled, nothing more, and the word did not convey the planet-devouring danger the strange stars held.

  Perhaps the Outlanders hailed from a world near one of those dark, hungry stars, and built their ships as homage to those world-eating celestials they worshipped as ravenous gods. Or perhaps the unrelenting darkness was simple camouflage in those cold star-reaches. Either way, if this lone ship made it past the defenses Queen Ahlgrena and her armies had raised, it would wreak terrible destruction across Erd’s ten continents.

  Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO

  A century before Vinca’s birth, the Rift first opened after Grünjord’s most powerful wizard botched a spell intended to create a new freshwater spring. One of the Outlanders’ ships had burst through and laid waste to kingdoms and nations as far south as the Qiimaha empire. Where the ships landed and the Outlanders spilled forth, those who met their blister-eyed gazes suffered seizures and madness and could not defend themselves. Hundreds of thousands died, mostly humans but dragons, too, and the ship was brought down only when the human kingdoms and dragon tribes pledged to set aside their grievances and work together. The land still bore blackened scars where no plants would grow, and people who stayed too long inside their borders later sickened with malignant tumors. Queen Ahlgrena’s great-grandfather took responsibility for his wizard’s accident and pledged to the neighboring kingdoms to do whatever he could to keep all their lands safe.

  “This one’s bigger than Queen Ahlgrena’s keep,” Bhraxio said as he pumped his leathery wings harder to rise above the Outland invader. His voice sounded profoundly worried inside Vinca’s mind.

  She could feel the quiver of his wing muscles’ strain through her sheepskin saddle. Fire-breathers like Bhraxio were inherently hot-blooded and could fend off the chill far better than humans, but this bright morning was exceptionally bitter. The extreme cold was taking a clear toll on the young dragon. The first breath of outside air had sent her into a coughing fit. If it were not for her magicimbued flight helmet—which in her wisdom Queen Ahlgrena had commissioned for all the dragoneers—her face would have already frozen as hard as a marble statue’s.

  “We can bring it down.” Vinca leaned forward in the saddle and gave Bhraxio a comforting gauntleted scratch through the woolly fur of his neck. There were thirty dragoneers in the skies today; they’d be able to surround the ship and bombard it with grenades enchanted to home in on and cling to the hot places on the hull where the strange, tough metal that composed the craft’s skin was weakest. It might take two hundred bombs to sunder the ship, but they had plenty of grenades and fliers with hand cannons. “We will bring it down.”

  “Try to bring it down in one piece,” Captain Gunther replied through the enchanted helmet. “Sister Lutera told the Queen that the monks need an intact ship for defensive study.”

  Vinca blinked. Their tried-and-true bombardments couldn’t possibly drop the ship whole. “That wasn’t the course we plotted this morning.”

  “New orders from the Queen’s captain,” Gunther replied simply. “She told me only a moment ago. You’re the first to know. I’ll tell the others shortly.”

  “Are we to endanger the towns for the sake of bringing the monks a scientific prize?”
Her voice was as sharp as her sword.

  Other dragoneers might have feared to speak to Gunther so boldly, but she and he had fought a dozen Outlander invasions together, drunk entire barrels of ale together, and sundered the springs of several beds together. Gunther, often grim and intimidating to his troops, was a surprisingly playful lover. Vinca was reasonably sure that she was only one of perhaps three people who’d ever heard the huge, bearded warrior laugh. If she couldn’t speak her mind to him, then she could speak it to no one.

  “No.” Gunther sounded unruffled. “Endanger none if you can. But a whole ship’s better than a burned wreck.”

  Life was precious in Grünjord; it had not always been so. But the constant Outlander threat had forced the kingdom to change and advance far beyond most other realms. Their King or Queen was no longer simply born to rule but had to be elected by representatives from every district. Grünjorders had become expert at waging war, but they also realized they had to build a country worth battling for. The kingdom was in a renaissance of the arts and sciences, and every child went to school to learn letters and numbers. Even the plumbing and heating in the average burgher’s house was considered rare in the homes of neighboring kingdoms and an unheard-of marvel in more distant lands. Vinca had spent her first seven years in her father’s keep in distant Coravia, and she could remember no pipes, only chamber pots and drafty latrines that opened to the polluted castle moat below.

  “Our troops wait on the ground,” Gunter said. “If you can bring it down within five leagues of the valley, the wizards will be able to slow its fall in the air, and our soldiers are prepared to clear the monsters inside.”

  “I spy it as being nearly five leagues away now,” she replied. “Do you mark it so?”

  “Aye,” he agreed.

  Then they hadn’t a moment to waste.

  “Rise!” she urged Bhraxio. “Get me well above the skyship! Keep pace!”

  With a great press of wings, the dragon did as she asked, and Vinca quickly unbuckled herself, unsheathed her skyship-metal boarding axe, and gathered her legs beneath her to get ready to leap clear of his wings.

  Based on the wrecked hunks they’d recovered, there would be a ring of wide, round porthole windows above a room near the center of the ship. The monks believed the monsters steered the craft from that room. From outside the ship, the windows appeared as the same flat black as the rest of the craft, but while the metal of the ship was supernaturally tough and could only be cut with magic, the glasslike material of the portholes would shatter beneath the Outlanders’ own metal.

  Vinca’s stomach churned. Many dragoneers had tried what she was about to attempt, and none so far had succeeded. Half had died, plunging to their deaths, smashed by the hull, or swept into the furnace blast of the ship’s strange engines. The odds that the wind would simply blow her off the top of the craft were extremely high. But if there was even a slight chance of bringing the ship down, she had to try.

  “Be ready to catch me,” she said. “Pull up on my mark so I can get clear of you, and watch for my fall!”

  “Aye!”

  Vinca gripped her axe tightly and held her position until they were over the middle of the vast ship; she guessed they were maybe fifty meters above it, but the void of the surface made distances difficult to gauge. “Now!”

  Bhraxio swept his wings in reverse, and Vinca used her sudden forward pitch to lengthen her jump. She vaulted over his muscular woolly shoulder and plummeted toward the ship.

  She spoke a simple charm to soften her fall. The plunge was quick and disorienting nonetheless, and instead of landing on her feet as she’d hoped, she landed painfully on her hip and began to slide across the ship, nothing but shapeless dark all around her. Her boots hit a metal edge and blackness loomed in front of her: it had to be a porthole.

  With both hands, she swung her axe into the mass. The glasslike material shattered inward, huge dark shards falling into a room that at first glimpse was a dazzling constellation of red, blue, and yellow lights. Her second glimpse showed her a gray metal deck three meters below and grotesquely misshapen creatures recoiling from the plummeting shards.

  Her mind swam when she saw the monsters below. They were like the bubbling scum that sometimes formed on stagnant ponds. No bones, no permanent limbs or heads that she could see, just roiling, shifting masses of colorless, gelatinous flesh. No—they had a color. It just wasn’t one she could name. Eerie green eyes boiled out of their flesh like pustules. There was no rhyme or reason to their forms, and they made terrible buzzing noises that bored right into her brain like parasitic worms trying to erase her thoughts and will to fight.

  Vinca shook her head to clear the vile buzz. She gripped her axe to her left fist, drew her magic-forged skymetal broadsword with her right. Took a deep breath. Leaped down onto the glass-strewn deck. She began to swing at anything and everything, a whirling cyclone of blades. Slashed panels sparked and smoked. The hideous Outlanders emitted fluting shrieks and recoiled from her onslaught.

  A tiny part of her was appalled by her indiscriminate brute force. Precise strikes based on careful foreknowledge of a foe’s weaknesses were best. But the monks couldn’t agree on what the different panels and gadgets controlled. It seemed best to destroy as much of their ability to pilot their ship as she could.

  And she couldn’t keep this up much longer. Her heart was pounding and her shoulders straining. Worse, the monsters in the room with her were recovering from their surprise, gathering together, melding into a huge, towering mass. She slashed at the looming monstrosity, but its jelly flesh seemed to heal itself the moment her blade passed through it—if these creatures had vitals, she could not reach them. At best she could pop a few of its vile eyes, but three more would blister open in its remains. Quicklime would melt an Outlander. She wished she’d thought to bring a bag of the white powder with her.

  “What’s happening in there?” Captain Gunther’s voice was faint inside her helmet.

  “Fighting,” she grunted, slashing at the monster.

  A light flashed near her, and she whirled and buried her axe in the panel with as much force as she could muster. A solid foot of the broad blade sunk into the metal and wires. Her shoulder and elbow ached sharply at the impact. A moment later, the ship gave a lurch and began to plummet.

  “Ah, well done!” Gunther exclaimed.

  Suddenly in free-fall, she and the monstrosity both rose off the gray metal floor. Vinca released her axe and kicked off from its stout leather-wrapped handle toward the broken porthole. The Outlander shrieked at her and lashed a gooey pseudopod around her ankle, trying to drag her back down. She slashed the fleshy snare off her boot with her sword and recited a levitation charm to ascend into the blue sky and blinding sunlight.

  The bitter wind slammed into her and knocked her breath away as it blasted her clear of the vast, plunging ship. The gale knocked her sword from her numbed fingers. She cartwheeled helplessly, unable to speak a charm to slow her fall, unable to right herself enough to get her bearings. The wind was so loud against her helmet she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hear the ship crashing if the wizards weren’t able to catch it.

  “Do you live? We can’t see you,” Gunther said.

  She couldn’t voice a reply in the thin air.

  “Bhraxio, please see me!” she thought, praying he could hear her. The mental connections many dragoneers had with their dragons was only as good as their line of sight. If they couldn’t see each other, they couldn’t hear each other. But Vinca had been able to talk to Bhraxio through castle walls. Now, she had no idea how far the ship had traveled while she’d been inside it, or whether he had been able to keep pace.

  “I’m almost there,” she heard inside her mind. “Roll yourself into a ball; I don’t want to break your limbs.”

  She hugged her legs to her chest and tucked her helmeted face to her knees.

  A moment later, she felt Bhraxio’s leathery talons close around her body, then a rough guts-
flattening jerk as he winged away.

  She felt dizzy from vertigo and relief, and in the sheltering cage of his claws, she could finally take a deep breath.

  “I’m alive,” she croaked to Gunther. “Bhraxio has me. Have the wizards got the ship?”

  “Yes!” he said. “Our ground troops are clearing it of Outlanders now. You’ve landed us a real prize! I reckon you won’t have to pay for your own drinks for at least a fortnight!”

  She smiled and massaged her shoulder. “I think tonight I’d rather have a hot bath and a rubdown.”

  He gave a sly chuckle. “I’m sure that can be arranged.”

  VINCA AND BHRAXIO WERE SURROUNDED by ecstatic troops and townspeople the moment he set her down along the main road into the city. She scrambled onto his back, and the next several hours were a blur of cheering people, waving pennants, and proffered goblets of ale and wine as the crowd led them in a parade through the villages outside the city wall, then through the gates and around the town square.

  Queen Ahlgrena herself brought Vinca up to her address balcony and gave a rousing speech in honor of the dragoneer and Bhraxio, who’d flown to a sturdy iron perch beside the elevated stage. Vinca, fortunately, wasn’t expected to do anything but stand steady and wave to the crowd below; that was enough of a challenge as she was dizzy with drink by then. After three rounds of huzzah!, the queen put a golden medal of honor on a red satin ribbon around Vinca’s neck. They all went downstairs to a fine banquet for all the dragoneers, wizards, and the men and women who’d slain the last of the Outlanders once the ship was grounded.

  In the castle’s ceremonial banquet hall, gilded statues of the old heroes of Grünjord gazed down upon them from alcoves ringing the ceiling. Half the alcoves were empty in anticipation of mighty new heroes. Though Vinca drank no more alcohol, her head swam at the realization that this day had earned her a place among them.

  After a dessert of intricately frosted cakes that seemed nearly too beautiful to eat, Gunther took her aside and led her through several gilt-and-marble corridors and staircases to an ornate set of double doors in crown prince Stellan’s wing of the palace.