Ahh, but he doesn’t know that yet.
So remember time is over.
Back to being.
So much easier.
Sorry for being unfair.
Warning: it might happen again.
That little bastard just had to keep stealing information for days and days, didn’t he?
[CLICK]
Now that Val was in on the plan and not trying to release me from my cushy cell, she was hounding Massey, his cronies, and anyone who would listen to her, all to make my life in the Pit easier. Had a care-package coming from T-Bone and that morning I was informed by Watson that I had been granted telephone privileges.
Nice one, Boomworm.
Gave me something to do during the day besides napping.
Which I did a bit during that morning after breakfast. Stealing being hard work and all. Lot harder work than I remember from my youth, but I suppose vault jobs ain’t on the same level as stealing some cigarettes or girly magazines.
One little blast of geo-anima versus whole bucket-loads of it.
Lights out at 8PM.
Picking up Val an hour later for Excursion Number Three.
Wasn’t no trial starting until tomorrow and Ceinwyn hadn’t arrived yet. Plenty of time for me to snooze in the artificial light of that glass and anima prison I found myself an occupant of.
Just snoozing the day away.
Make some phone calls later.
Just a good prisoner accepting his lot in life.
My lot in life . . . knowing all the Divines is nice, but what I really need to do is find out where they keep the information about higher anima powers. Was a good number of artifacts I needed to take pictures of still and all those displays on the walls too.
For the first time during this whole plan I felt a bit of nerves. Closed my eyes and there it was in the darkness with me, where I couldn’t ignore it. Not that some prisoner would start shit or . . . I don’t know. Just that everything was going well. To plan. Everything going well? When that happen? Never, that’s when! Even with me deciding to be the one to dictate events instead of letting Fate do her thing, the Bitch-Queen couldn’t sit idle forever.
Yet . . .
No sight of those great, big, juicy melons wiggling to make my life miserable with one bit of Crazy after the next.
You’re just tired, I told myself. Tired and too emotional for your own good, what with the way Val flirted last night. What she’s saying doesn’t match the emotion you’re seeing from her. All those primal, bodily signals say you still have a shot at winning her over . . . you’re more worried about that than you are Massey or the rest.
Of course I was.
That was it.
High school drama shit.
Yeah, nothing but that.
Had to be Val.
Val’s the only string I ever wanted, but it’s still a string. Might be better at accepting them, but I’m still not good at it. Still a shit tier noob as Prunella would say. Massey, I could handle Massey. Caused Massey’s little power play to begin with. His ass was grass. Sure, didn’t know how the trial would go down, didn’t know who most of the witnesses were or what evidence they might have, and any Artificer could be on the jury . . . also, if the Lady decided she was through with me then that would be that . . .
Okay, maybe I should be a little worried about the trial.
But not this worried.
And the Geo Realm . . . I’m a fucking god in the Geo Realm. Only the dragon could match me and he was locked up. Was more scared for the Sawaephim than I was myself or anyone I brought with me. Got to give me that one, Fate! What could you possibly throw at me that could hurt me in the Geo Realm? Nothing; that’s right, Bitch Queen, absolutely nothing!
But with Val . . .
Wasn’t a string at the moment, just a single thread.
Anything could cut it and how easy it would be.
Felt like my last chance to do this right.
Felt . . .
Feelings . . .
Yeah, had to talk about those shitty things with her soon.
Just . . . needed the right moment.
Try Number Four, can’t fuck it up. Just got the overtime thanks to all this madness, don’t think Try Number Five will be happening in the future. Ever. Even in the brightest timeline.
Try Number Four, it’s an elemental kind of number for an elemental kind of couple.
Win her now or lose her forever.
You’re already all in on the Guild, on being a Maximus, on telling Ceinwyn the truth . . . time to go all in on Val too. Somehow, you have to find it. No matter how much of a scared little boy you are inside of all that endless rage, King Henry Price. Find it or accept a starless night.
Down, down, can’t go back up. Only way to escape is to keep falling and ain’t a better way to fall than to fall in love.
Fucking subconscious . . .
I liked it better when you were an asshole.
[CLICK]
“So how’s the weather in Fresno?” I greeted T-Bone over the phone with the pure banality that’s expected from the civilized among us.
The phone was one of those old, bulky plastic jobs with a pig’s tail cord made you question how much acid the engineer was on at the time he designed it. Fucking mess of a cord. Like one really long, beige, rubber pubic hair. So tangled up on itself you go in for a scratch on the boys and then your hand is caught in a wristlock. Pull the damn thing out and you got this ugly red welt for the next three days you have to promise the college girls ain’t herpes. Come on, I’ve had herpes cured three times now and that is not herpes!
“It’s hot,” was T-Bone’s just as bland answer, even if I could hear nerves in his voice.
We’d prepared for this eventuality; T-Bone’s idea, not mine. You ain’t ever seen paranoid until you give a cyber security expert a secret mission. More paranoid than I ever was, even when I was hiding all my secrets. Minute he agreed to help with this plan, he started checking the Nerd Nirvana for electronic bugs every four hours, plus an extra sweep every time a shipment came in.
You want to see something funny, you watch a six-foot-four, three-hundred pound black man run around a comic shop with an aluminum wand checking for bugs. So damn funny, in fact, that I started ordering more shipments just so I could get some extra chuckles in.
Yeah, yeah, I’m a bad friend, we knew this already.
Paranoid or not, he was the one who came up with our shitty little code. If I’m on my own phone or a phone I have no reason to expect is bugged, I greet him with a question about football. Not that he could answer it, Madden being the only football he’s ever paid any attention to, but it let him know he could breathe a sigh of relief and we could have ourselves an honest discussion about what we were up to.
Which as I’ve hinted at was more than just breaking into the Guild Vault for the information I wanted.
Got yourself an opportunity to sniff out some enemies . . . why not take it?
Not that we could talk about any of that over the Guild’s phone lines. Forget taping us, Massey was probably listening in as we spoke. If not him, then that lawyer of his, MacNess. Fucking Scot serving the powers that be, what’s his problem? Pisses off every fiber left over from the English-killing, crag-water beer drinking, manly-skirt wearing ancestors in my bloodstream.
But back to the code: if I thought someone was listening in, I went with the weather. Hence the banality.
Then we had some codes to work our way through.
“Where are you calling from?” T-Bone asked instead of answering right away.
“Where you think? How’s the weather?”
“Valentine called yesterday to tell me what happened to you,” T-Bone kept playing straight instead of moving into the codes. “She had me put together a goodie bag for you and seemed to think she could get you out of the prison in a few days. Do you . . . think that’ll happen?”
I let out a sigh. Okay, he was worried all our planning had gotten blown
to fuck due to my awesome ex-girlfriend getting too much shit done. Well, if he wouldn’t go into the codes, then I was. “I don’t think so. After that first day she seemed to realize what we’re up against here. All she’s done today is get me phone privileges. All the rumors about the Pit are overblown, place is a cakewalk. Took my more violent artifacts and recorded everything, but left me anything I would want to use anyway. Mostly been lounging around, since the trial don’t start until tomorrow. Lots a sleep, had a dream about vampires last night, Val was in it.”
T-Bone’s sigh of relief came over the other end. “That sounds . . . great. Very good. Great. Very Great.”
Summary: I’m fine, have all the artifacts I need for the job, have been breaking out and have found information on the Divines.
Key to code is to not sound like it is code.
I think.
I sure fucking hope it is . . .
“How’s Fresno?” I tried a third time.
“Weather’s not as hot as usual,” he finally told me.
Okay, that meant something happened at the shop. Good. That was good. If it’s the something I want to happen and not the shop burning down in flames again. “You close down like you were supposed to?”
“Everyone’s on vacation.” Everyone in Fresno was fine. “We had a shipment come in last night.” Someone broke into the shop last night. “I dropped by this morning to put them in the safe.” They also broke into my fake safe in the floor. “Nothing in the packages looked damaged.” They didn’t destroy anything in my workshop. “But it didn’t look very clean.” They ransacked the store looking for something. “Maybe we should get a different delivery man, maybe even a woman, maybe even a few of them.”
It was the Three Queens.
Well, fuck. Three Queens in my shop . . . even planning for it, my pee-hole is about ready to seal itself shut just to be safe. Had this mental image of what it played out like. Catherine going about the rooms feeling for drafts of air only she could see. Teresa searching for nice kindling to start a quick fire. Mary . . . probably humped my metal table down in my workshop.
“You sure about that? A few?”
“Already started searching for possible replacements.”
He had them on tape.
“How are the vacations going?”
“Vicky and I are at home, Prunella went to some convention, and Pocket and Jesus are doing some camping to the north. Stopped for the night, then headed north again.”
First was just to let me know Vicky and Prunella were okay. Second was to tell me Pocket and Jesus were tracking the Three Queens like we’d planned. North of Fresno, a stop at night, then north some more. Fuck me, this plan keeps working this well and I’m gonna get more paranoid than T-Bone is searching for bugs. “They take the RV again or just playing it by ear?”
“Got the RV working last I heard,” T-Bone said.
We had left a few objects in the safe, just for show mostly, and each one had an anima tracker disc in it. So far the Three Queens hadn’t wised up to the fact and Jesus and Pocket were using them to follow.
“Not my place to tell those two how to have fun,” I decided after awhile. Let the FIND officers do their job tracking the Three Queens however they wanted. With or without my help at getting the chase started. North . . . that’s a good sign they’re heading back to Paine’s hideout. Ceinwyn might not even be able to get mad at me if I can tell her where the Curator’s asylum is at . . . okay, she’ll get mad, but it might keep her from ripping chunks of my body off.
If Pocket and Jesus could do it.
Without getting caught.
Or killed.
“Tell them to be on the safe side,” I added.
“You okay?” T-Bone asked, always considerate of emotions, even in the middle of a massively complex plan that had one of us in prison.
“Fine. Not much to do during the day. Get bored. No anima. Just watching the other prisoners playing chess . . . or snoozing. Got some security golems following me around, call ‘em Salt and Pepper.”
“That’s surprisingly PC for you.”
“Right? I could’ve called them Whigger and—”
“How’s everything with Valentine going?” he interrupted before I could make the prude in him twitch.
“Fine . . . she’s great. Like always.”
“Did you tell her how you feel yet?”
“I told you this wasn’t about that.”
“You were lying. We both know you were lying.”
“Fine . . . yeah, some of it . . . most of it.”
He sighed in frustration, reading my voice. “But not the big one.”
“No, not the big one.”
“If she’s not mad about all the other stuff, you should get to that soon.”
“She’s excited by the other stuff. Twinkle in her eye . . . you know Val.”
“Not as well as I know you. King Henry, please tell her you love her already, so the rest of us can stop bracing for the outcome, one way or the other,” T-Bone ordered me.
“No promises,” I told him before putting the phone down on the receiver.
Time for some more napping.
King Henry Price, he’s just a boring ol’ prisoner waiting for his trial to start.
Think Massey will get pissed if I nap through the circus he’s prepared for the Guild?
Guess we’d find out tomorrow.
Tonight, all I cared about was tonight.
The Pit . . . ain’t nothing to worry about.
The Pit . . . kind of a nice place, all in all.
I fell asleep imagining laughter in my ears and Val’s arms clasped along my chest, the both of us geo-surfing off into eternity.
Session 169
Epiphany.
Maybe my favorite word.
Better than ‘fucktard’ even. Really starting to grow on me. Epiphany. Something magnificent about it all. The letters, the way lines break away from the whole, below and above. Then the idea of it all . . . that sudden flash of insight. Change. Epiphany is change above all else, and in that change you find a break from what’s come before. Not a bit of gradual, not a bit of evolution in it. Not even the revolution that keeps circling back around but mutation.
Epiphany creates a crevasse in time. Let’s you look down on the break. Let’s you see what you were before and what you are now. Look down into the core, into the heart of the problem. None of the bullshit, no excuses about that static, unstoppable tide of inertia. A finger pointing at the exact problem, a declaration of how to bridge said crevasse.
Epiphany.
How many times have I said epiphany runs my business life? Pushes forward the designs of my artifacts, pushes forward my troublesome understanding of how false our world is, how many lies it’s been built upon, so fragile that a house of cards looks like it’s built from steel beams in comparison.
Epiphany . . . I’ve lauded it before, but never for fixing my personal life.
My personal life hasn’t been very clean. No place for mutation, only survival of the fittest. Been messy. A hammer above my head and the anvil of time beneath it. Forging me nice and slow; painfully, one strike at a time.
Stop.
Being.
A.
Dumbass.
Okay, okay.
I get it.
Stop.
Doing.
The.
Same.
Stupid.
Shit.
No epiphany, just repetition with similar results. Try Number Four, gonna fuck that one up too.
Right until I was geo-surfing along, on my way to pick up Val for the night.
Was a good night to tell her. Knew that. Second night. Three little words be easier to get out. Won’t sound pathetic or like my usual bullshit on the second night, will it? Won’t be pressuring her from the get go. None of those pesky feelings of reconciliation fouling our emotions up more than my foul mouth ever could. Had us a night of fun thieving together in the bag. Mark that win colum
n with a night to remember. Val was settled into it all again, not dazed by the sudden influx of Crazy in her life.
Perfect night to tell her.
Three little words.
Say them, one after another.
Done, easy.
But . . . how? Where? All that newspaper journalist shit.
In her apartment? Troublesome that one. Just seem like I’m trying to get her into that weirdly placed bed of hers, up above the kitchen. Not that I’d mind trying to break the stairs connects it all and send us to the floor, but . . . didn’t seem right. Ain’t a romantic guy, but even I know that’s in the negatives.
What about the Vault? Wouldn’t she be distracted then? I would be too . . . too much around us we wanted to focus on. I love you, Val. What was that? I said . . . I . . . like, love you. Can you believe this is a scroll from the Ming Dynasty? You never think of Eastern mancers, but they had quite an equal evolution to our own, they even began elemental schools centuries before the Romans got around to it. That’s . . . that’s nice. Wait . . . what did you say?
Could wait until tomorrow in court. Stand up before all those old geezers and saggy-titted matrons, announce my love for her with an audience of dozens. She’d never forget that one. Might Fireball of Doom me out of embarrassment though. Also have to share the moment with Massey . . .
Fucking emotions, this is why I hate them.
Punching shit is so much simpler . . .
Even artifacts and the Mancy seem simpler than this. Might even put politics below it all too. Maybe if I’d been raised normally then this wouldn’t be hard. Maybe if I could remember what affection was supposed to look like, feel like. Between my parents as they kept the household together, as they raised three kids; between my sisters and me as we watched out for one another. I was so young when the ‘Bad Days’ started that I didn’t have the references most people get. In the dark. All felt empty in my life, a hole.
A Gap in a dead woman’s chest.
The Pit of No Return (The King Henry Tapes Book 6) Page 26