“When do we go?” June stood up.
“Once the market fills up with people. That’ll make it easier. And once it is lighter out, we’ll be able to see if rains. We don’t want to get caught out if that happens.”
June’s eyes widened. He might be from Palentar, but he knew about the rain. “So in about an hour, or so?” he asked.
“Or so,” Tiago said. “I still need to pick the lock on the bars.” He reached into the seam of his pants, ripped at it, and slipped a few metal wires out.
He shouldn’t have attempted to smuggle them into Dekkan, if they’d been found he could have gotten into more trouble.
But he’d been too terrified to not get sent in there without something he might need.
Now he was grateful for that motivating terror.
“Go stand by the door,” he told June. “Warn me if you hear footsteps.”
Chapter Eleven
For Kay sometimes it felt good to melt into a crowd. To walk around, anonymous, without the tendrils of power needing maintained and twitched. That itch in the back of her brain that insisted on decoding every intonation of voice, the sum of all one’s movements, the smell of a person, all that was overwhelmed by the crowd.
Maybe there were older versions of her kind that could manipulate an entire crowd. Maybe she could, one day, she mused.
But for now, she was a drop in the sea of human activity and bustle, slipping here and there as she made her way across the square, the sun hot on her face.
She’d secured the asset. She’d seen promise in the pickpocket. The Doaq had been frustrated yet again, and soon she’d find out whether Nashara had done it any damage.
There were new weapons already being handed out to the Ox-men that Nashara had delivered in those wooden packing crates, as part of the deal.
And Kay had a super weapon. A small nuclear weapon. Large enough to destroy three miles of the entire island. And the Doaq with it.
Kay had limited access to the worlds of information outside of Placa del Fuego. She’d been free of Okur for two years. She’d barely understood what the worlds outside Okur were when she’d first landed on the docks of Placa del Fuego.
She sure as hell hadn’t understood what a wormhole was, and had screamed the first time a ship sailed through one, thinking it was a portal to the afterlife.
Ignorance.
She’d been a mewling infant before all this.
Worse. She’d been a tool. An empty mind to be wielded by Lord Sassamich and his entire flock. She’d been little more than a well-trained dog, she thought as she paid the fare to ride a cable car toward the Back Circle. A dog to shepherd all the other human animals on the Sizit estate.
Today she’d faced down someone powerful. One of the great manipulators of the Forty-Eight worlds. Nashara herself. Kay smiled. She’d played it right. With this bomb she would rule the island. Not just the criminal underworld, which had been the slow and bloody struggle she’d set herself on for the last two years.
No, she’d turn this island into a fortress of safety, with herself deeply ensconced at the very heart of it. And she could maybe finally relax.
Her moment of calm and release faded when she approached the current headquarters. She’d remained here a bit long, three days instead of her usual two.
But she liked the pit in the basement. That had worked really well with Nashara.
She saw the miasma of fear and nervousness on the spotters outside as she walked up the road. They were supposed to look like they belonged on the street out here, but almost everyone had a weapon.
“You all might as well be holding signs that say ‘Criminal Operation Inside’ the way you are acting,” Kay hissed. She cornered one of her lieutenants. “Hide those weapons, and get them to calm down, damn it.”
The moment she stepped inside, a wide-eyed Runner, towering over Kay by what seemed like several feet, rushed over. “Bakeem sends you a note from the lookout position at the end of Tracy Street.”
The Runner half bowed and presented Kay with a hastily scrawled note. She reeked of sweat, Kay thought, and the note she’d handed over was crumpled.
Kay smoothed it out on a table.
“You were there?” she asked. “With Bakeem?”
The runner nodded. Her eyes were still wide. “The Doaq attacked. It is after you, ma’am. One of the Runners heard it demand your location from an Ox-man still alive on the lower floor. Then he leapt out the window and ran on a broken leg to us.”
“Bakeem stayed at the lookout?” Kay asked. He should have come back, or be following behind the Runner.
But the Runner blinked. “Bakeem’s dead,” she said. “I heard the Doaq attack the lookout even as I ran.”
Kay leaned on the table. That news shouldn’t have hurt. But it did. She’d gotten close to Bakeem, she realized. Close enough to care a little.
“Did you see it with your own eyes,” Kay demanded.
“No, I ran, and I didn’t look back. But …”
“Then we don’t know, do we, for sure?” Kay muttered, and threw the note to the ground. The Runner said nothing, just stood there, waiting to see if Kay had more orders. Kay shook her head. “Go. Leave.”
The Doaq would be here shortly, she realized.
All her carefully laid plans crumbling, Kay made her way down to the basement. She’d been careful to remain a puppet master, but the Doaq had figured her out.
Maybe it had caught and figured out how to torture the information out of Nashara. Maybe Nashara had just done it out of spite before dying.
Or maybe Nashara was alive. But if so, where was she?
Kay shook her head. No, it was probably one of her people it had caught. Kay crossed the length of the basement and stopped. “Jerome.” She called one of the armored-vest-wearing Ox-men over. “Bakeem’s dead.”
The Ox-man regarded her with a placid gaze. “At the look out?” he asked in his in his sparse, simplified way. “Who?”
“The Doaq did it. It’s looking for me.” Kay watched his reaction. The Ox-man expressed sorrow with a slight slump of his shoulders, and then a bit of dull anger, and resolve.
Perfect.
“You’re my Number One now,” Kay told Jerome. “The Doaq will be coming, and it’s time to set up the welcome Bakeem and I planned for it. How long do you need?”
Jerome unconsciously brushed at the shaggy hair all around his face as he thought. So freaking slow, Kay thought. But reliable. And strong. And brave to a fault. “It began already. Runners said the Doaq comes. I prepare.”
“Well done,” Kay smiled. “Then send everyone out.”
Jerome nodded, looked around the room, and shouted, “Out!”
Ox-men, Runners, and other guards all walked out, occasionally glancing back at her as they did so.
Once they’d all left, Kay crossed to the piled up wooden crates at the back of the basement. Nashara’s gifts. Most of them had been pried open, their contents distributed. Rocket launchers, high-powered machine guns, explosives, and other goodies.
Only one crate remained untouched.
“Hello,” Kay said, running a hand over the top of it.
She’d risked a lot for this.
She sat down on top of the crate, removed a knife and an apple, and began to methodically cut slices off.
The sound of gunfire began in the distance. Jerome and his Ox-men laying down fire against the Doaq. Several RPG rounds crumped into the street, shaking the walls.
This had quickly turned into a mess, hadn’t it?
Her hands shook. She put the knife and apple down, and faced the door as screams and shouts floated from nearby houses. She’d been too focused on trying to grow her little empire. Too focused on fighting the biggest fight. Too attached to Placa del Fuego. Now it would all be ripped away.
A tear surprised her, and she rubbed it off her cheek with a fingertip. She looked at the liquid. Where did you come from? She wondered. It had been a long time.
If it wa
s death that came, she told herself, wiping her fingertip on her trousers, it was a delayed one. One that sniffed and hunted her down in the sands of Okur. The one that that tried to devour her in the refugee camps.
She had lived and thrived for two years. It was two years more than anyone she’d once thought of as her family had been given.
The door to the basement opened, and the Doaq stooped to step through.
Kay watched the eyes deep inside the burnt, frayed cowl. Jerome had fought hard. But in the end, as they’d both known, the Doaq was still standing here.
The Doaq’s jaw did not drop to the ground to reveal that maw to hell. It just … regarded her.
Well, now, this was a game Kay understood.
One hand still in her left pocket, she picked up the apple and bit into it. A large, juicy, messy chunk came off, and Kay started chewing. And watching.
I’m not scared of you, she thought. Because I know what is coming next. I am in control now. I am back.
She swallowed. Rotated the apple. Bit deeply into it again.
The Doaq hesitantly stepped forward.
“That’s far enough.” Kay pulled her left hand out of her jacket and showed the Doaq what was in it. The wired trigger that ran to the small nuclear bomb she was sitting on top of. “Stay right there.”
It looked at the columns, and then down at the floor it stood on. Just like Nashara, it understood exactly what it had walked into.
So it knew. And Kay knew.
And they were back to staring at each other.
Then it groaned – a deep and hideous sound, half corrupt machine and half alien vowels that sounded like nothing at all human. But there was a question behind it, and when it finished, it stared expectantly at her.
“I am Kay. You are?”
The Doaq flicked one of its hands, and a leaf of metal fluttered through the air to land at the wood near Kay’s folded feet.
She put down the apple and picked it up.
It was a silvered business card. Like the ones the rich folk in the Greenhouse districts traded back and forth.
Printed in simple block letters was: D.o.Acq.
Kay didn’t understand. But she pocketed it anyway. “So you are the Doaq.”
It gave a half bow of agreement.
“You understand your position here, correct?” Kay asked it. “It isn’t just a pit you are standing over and charges in those columns pointed at you, but it is also that I am sitting on a nuclear bomb large enough to destroy both of us, and a third of Placa del Fuego.”
She stood up and kicked the cover of the crate open, then stepped aside. An invitation for the alien to see for itself.
It seemed to stretch taller for a moment, peering into the crate, then the shadows it cast shrunk back and the Doaq returned to its normal height.
The sleeves and skeletal fingers fluttered, and it tossed another metal card toward the crate with a puff of silver dust.
Carefully Kay picked it up while facing the Doaq.
“Not … fully nuclear,” Kay read out loud softly. “Dirty bomb.”
Her lips dried.
No.
The Doaq did not look triumphant. But its posture had changed slightly. More relaxed, Kay thought, mind working overtime.
Which was bad. Really bad.
But it hadn’t moved on her.
“It’s not a real nuclear weapon,” she said. “Nashara just packed some radioactivity around a complex-looking weapon to satisfy my tests. But it’ll still sting, won’t it?”
The Doaq nodded and stepped forward. It presented another silvered card, carefully laid on the floor between them, then backed away.
Kay could see the words without picking it up.
WHERE IS THE BOY?
“Why would I tell you that?”
Another card was presented.
THE LOCATION FOR YOUR LIFE.
Kay stared at it for a long moment, trying to decide if it spoke the truth. Unlike the humans she could read so well, it was alien. There were some common body postures, but it was only glancing knowledge. Imperfection.
The Doaq was no open book.
But this was a path out. It was a chance for life, when she’d resigned herself to dying.
“You’ve killed most of my people,” she said. “What happens next?”
It thought for a moment and conjured up another card.
LEAVE. OR I WILL COME FOR YOU. THIS ISLAND IS MINE, NOT YOURS.
For a moment Kay’s thumb hovered over the switch. Pure defiance rippled through her. This place did not belong to the alien.
But she slumped and looked down at the ground. “Market-square. The third brick house on the north side. Five seven six. In the top room.”
She tensed, waiting for the sudden presence of the Doaq to swoop toward her, for the necessity of plunging her thumb down, for ending it all.
But there was nothing.
The Doaq was gone.
Chapter Twelve
After a long hour of watching Tiago fiddle with the lock, June started to get anxious. “Why is it taking so long?”
Tiago’s left leg burned, a cramp from the odd position he held himself in, balanced on the back of the couch under the barred window.
“It isn’t fast work,” he grunted. “It is a lock. I’m not supposed to be able to stick just anything in it and get it to pop open, you know?”
“I guess,” June mumbled.
Tiago finally hopped down from the back of the couch and massaged his cramping leg as June stared at him. “I need to sit a second.”
June sighed, frustrated, and looked up at the window. “Why do you know how to pick a lock?”
Tiago stared at him. “Why do you think?”
June looked back down, then up, then bit his lip. “You’re a thief?”
“I do what I need to stay alive,” Tiago said firmly, kneading his calf. “If it makes you feel better I mainly pick pockets. As you can tell, I’m not so good at picking locks.”
“But what about your parents?” June protested.
“I don’t have any.”
“Oh.” That sucked the wind right out of June there. “There wasn’t … anything else you could do …” he trailed off.
“Fuck you,” Tiago said. “Stay here in this room, if you want. You don’t have to accept my help.”
“No, it’s not that …” June shook his head. “I need to shut up. Go ahead. Please.”
“Oh, well, thank you for granting me permission to continue,” Tiago said. “Is there anything else?”
June just stared ahead, not making eye contact.
In a dark mood, Tiago stood back up with a wince and got back to trying to pop the frustratingly stout lock on the bars.
Now he wished he’d practiced more. It was always a question of practicing. And he never did enough of it on the collection of locks Kay made available. Always figured he’d try that later. Well here it was. Later. And he just couldn’t get the damn thing to click.
The tiniest shift through the pick let him know he’d gotten the tumblers lined up.
“Got it!”
He yanked the lock off and tossed it to the couch. Then he tested the hinged bars, nudging them slightly.
They groaned as he opened them just a hair.
Tiago stopped. “We need to lubricate them with something. We don’t want to get caught because they heard us opening these.”
He hopped down and rummaged around in the bathroom. Then smiled to find a small bottle of baby oil under the sink.
Back at the couch he slowly squeezed oil onto the top hinges of the bars, one on each side. Then he switched to the lower hinges. The oil dripped down the sides of the windows and onto the wall, and then onto the back of the couch.
No turning back now; the mess and stains were pretty obvious. But a test shove of the bars sounded acceptably crunchy instead of squeaky, and hopefully not loud enough to draw definite trouble.
He jumped off the couch.
“Whe
re are you going?” June asked.
“Wash my hands.”
“Come on, let’s go!”
Tiago held up his slick hands. “I don’t want to fall to my death.”
June grimaced, frustrated, and Tiago smiled as he quickly soaped up his hands and scrubbed off the baby oil.
He came out still drying his hands.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Tiago crept out onto the window and looked down at the small gap between the houses. Just large enough to store some garbage cans and for him to fall between to his messy, cobblestoned death.
He jumped, dropped five feet, and felt the roof give slightly under him.
Back up on the window, June looked nervous. “Is it safe?”
“Perfectly,” Tiago lied with total earnestness.
June jumped, struck the roof, and his feet slid out from under him. Tiles broke loose and slid away, but Tiago crabbed his way down the roof and grabbed the tiles before they went over the edge and alerted anyone that they were up there.
The roof creaked under them.
June started to move toward the side, looking toward the market, but Tiago shook his head. “Stay on the roof. They’ll notice us down there.” And when they were discovered gone, the Runners and Ox-men would fan out down there, hunting them. Rooftop to rooftop would keep them out of sight longer.
And no Ox-men would be running along these old roofs.
Tiago faced the slopes of Placa del Fuego to orient himself, checked the mists at the peaks of the island, then turned back toward the ocean. They were close to the docks.
Suddenly this crazy plan seemed possible.
Tiago led them away from the market along rooftops. They clambered awkwardly up drain spouts and slipped on tiles. But they made it to the edge of the docks after an exhausting hour.
“Did you hear that?” June asked.
Tiago turned back. “What?” he asked irritably.
“I thought I heard gunfire.”
Maybe there’d been a popping sound, somewhere in the background of Placa del Fuego’s ocean of noise. But it was far enough back they didn’t need to worry about it this second.
The Apocalypse Ocean Page 6