by Andrew Post
“Hurt your feelings, did I?” He tipped his head to the side, pouting. He thumbed back the gun’s hammer. “Boohoo. Talk.”
“All right, fine.” Nevele balled a fist at her side. “You got me. You win. Here. Your prize.” Pitching her hand forward, she sent a spiraling surge of threads.
He flung himself from the bar stool.
Target missed, the column of threads collided and tangled with the liquors shelved behind the bar, breaking bottles with the impact.
At this, Raziel smiled winningly and raised the gun to take aim at her.
Without hesitation, Nevele made her stitches latch onto the shelf and yanked. It snapped free of the wall, crashing over the bar and into Raziel’s back, swatting him to the floor like a fly.
Under the crushing weight, Raziel struggled to his hands and knees, lifting the destroyed shelf with him, a multicolored flood of spirits and glass shards raining onto him. With effort, he shouldered it aside.
A majority of his makeup had been washed away. His left eye had lost its contact, leaving it completely black while the other was still its artificial blue-green, its incongruity mirroring the damaged mind behind.
But uneven as his eyes were, from them came a unanimous thing: fury.
CHAPTER 7
And How Did You Two Meet?
The second voice in the Bullet Eater’s head informed him, “It’s getting dodgy in there. Get ready to move in.”
“Let the frigate hail Adeshka.”
“What?”
“Let Raziel and Tym get what’s coming to them. King Chidester can be the hero. We can be done with them today.”
“As nice as that sounds, you know they’d find some way to get even with us, even from prison.”
Aksel didn’t doubt it. “Fine, aye-aye, portside emergency hatch. On it.”
Giving the sticks a sideways shove, he dropped his stolen starship free of the white contrails and tore up alongside the long flank of the frigate. His hands shook, both from the feedback in the sticks with the thrusters being put through their paces and from his fraying nerves.
Try to understand, gods, he begged the ether, I’m just following orders. He pushed in near the hatch, which was striped a cautionary red and white. Getting too close set off some kind of automatic security system. Turrets popped from hidey-holes along the second ship’s flank and immediately opened fire. With deft shimmying of the sticks, erratically weaving the Praise to Her, Aksel managed to dodge a majority of the blasts. He believed one had found its mark. The Praise to Her gave a painful whine, and the control panel lit up in ways no pilot ever wants to see.
Plunging and dodging, he kept peeking over, hoping to see the door open. What was taking them so long? Aksel continued barrel rolling and twisting to busy the turrets, all the while wishing they’d just run out of damn bullets already.
“I can’t stay here all day. I’m taking fire, a shiteload of it.”
“Get ready. They’re coming out.”
Aksel smacked the autopilot button and undid his harness. As he stumbled through the holds of the ship, the artificial-gravity generator became confused. Aksel used the dangling stowage straps like a ladder.
Reaching the cargo door, he threw the lock and let the wind drag it aside. The bare world stretched before him, the setting suns blinding him. And such a long drop from here . . .
His arm hooked into the handle flanking the door. As the starship bounced, a few times his feet left the floor. Once he nearly spun on the axis of the handle and out.
Through the chaos, a small thought passed: Redemption’s never out of reach if you’re willing to stretch some. But how? And when?
He watched the glass panel in the frigate hatch and waited for shadows. What would he do when he saw Raziel and Tym appear there, wanting to board? Help them or defy them? Flip of a coin, really. He’d likely end up dead either way.
Under the barrage of gunfire, Nevele dove beneath the table. She crawled to the next aisle of the unoccupied dining room. She could see the green glowing exit sign across the room, but right now it may as well have been miles off.
The passengers, clearly having heard the shots, screamed in the decks below. Nevele stole a second to retract the trailing threads and free them in a cracking snap as Raziel stepped out to fire.
He drew up an arm, letting them coil around his wrist, and pulled. Effectively on a lead, Nevele struggled to move, but every time she attempted to jink left or right he’d give her another tug—keeping her in his wavering sights.
Just as she flipped the dessert cart up between them, the bullet pierced it. She gave her threads a pull, and Raziel screamed as they ripped free of his arm. She was about to take aim and thrash him again when the dagger of pain plunged into her chest again.
Clawing at herself, unable to stop, she snapped stitches, and panels of skin fell away. Jumping red veins framed the world above, and Raziel stepped in.
“I wonder how much you’ve told him. He must suspect something. Only so much can fit under one rug. Ever give my big brother a peek at what you swept under?”
Nevele fought the pain. “You know who Gorett had kill your father, right?”
His face twisted up.
“I take that as a no.” To let Raziel see, she let herself think of her brother and the hurts she’d given him.
Apparently he pieced together that Pitka Gorett had assigned Vidurkis Mallencroix to kill his father. Raziel’s lips peeled back. He spread his open hand wide and crushed it into a fist.
Another salvo of soul-rending misery came. Blackness crept in, and Nevele sank into it, drawn deeper and deeper.
“It doesn’t matter,” Raziel said, from somewhere outside the void. “I’ll get Gorett’s head once I’m on the throne. Dry the banks to their foundations, putting every bounty hunter in the world on the job. But before we can do that, we need to save the city. Now what did the pirate tell you?”
Even if she wanted to answer, she couldn’t. Her hands, on autopilot, dug and dug, raking fingernails across raw, exposed muscle below. Anything to get it out. With the next breath she was able to snag—it felt as if her ribs were thorny on the inside—the air had a pungent muddy taste. Like a river, stirred up into a muddy froth after rain . . .
“You’ll beg me for this bullet while that water fills your lungs over and over just like it did his.”
Chest convulsing, tasting river, she held Raziel’s mismatched gaze, stubborn to the last.
“When are the Odium going to attack Geyser? Tell me.”
She wanted to answer, if only to not feel this anymore, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t. “No.”
Raziel sighed. “Fine. We’ll just have to take you along and continue this conversation at a new location.” He spoke into his walkie-talkie. “Get up here, Tym. We’re jumping ship. Karl, get the Bullet Eater ready.”
From his coat pocket, he produced a small black sphere and tossed it into the center of the dining area. Producing twiggy legs, the tripod righted itself. It flashed, and when her eyes adjusted, she saw the Dapper Tom, the Odium’s winking cartoon cat face, burned onto the wall.
“The Odium want our city?” Raziel said. “Then they’ll have to deal with Adeshka’s reaction to them shooting down one of their frigates first. Peace doesn’t occur naturally. It’s what results, never what comes first. It has to be sought to be had. And sometimes, using equations some may not think of as very nice.”
The ball rolled, stood, and flashed Clyde’s picture onto the next wall. Do Not Trust, it read. The ball rolled on, alternating the insignia and the libel about her fiancé—flash, flash.
“And he can have some bad press too while we’re at it.”
Nevele couldn’t stand, let alone walk, and Raziel dragged her along by her hood. They passed through the kitchen into the crew quarters. She continued to paw at her chest, convinced that if she could spit right now, it’d be bloody.
The dagger happened upon something—a boarded-off room in her mind holding a memory t
hat, if she accidentally bumped into in her day-to-day, would make her want to busy her hands with something, frantic for distraction.
But now the planks were coming loose, the dagger’s edge working under each nail head, prying . . .
Nevele had gone to a crossroads a few miles outside Exalcrodt, the marshlands. A handwritten letter signed by Zoya Kesbanya had brought her.
Zoya wanted someone to help her. She was a weaver. Her gift: she could adjust gravity in little pockets of space. Make things levitate regardless of how heavy. The cost, the flip side, as there always is with fabrick: some bleeding from the ears whenever she overexerted herself.
Stumbling upon her elevating the backyard swing set over her head, her father pulled Zoya from school so she could help save his floundering shipbuilding business. She worked like a dog, being tasked with moving the superstructures for fishing vessels. She was so tired it took her three days to write the letter.
Nevele went at once.
She arrived and was not warmly welcomed by the girl’s father, a bone-thin man with a sheen to his eyes that suggested a crippling chemical dependency. She asked to see Zoya. He refused. After he pushed her away from the door, Nevele noticed his hand had left a red smudge on her cloak.
Seeing it too, he tried to lie. He’d cut himself working.
Nevele ignored his demands for her to leave then.
“She just gets worked up, and she bleeds from her ears when she does. It’s no big deal,” the girl’s father said, following Nevele into the muddy shipyard.
“Where is she?”
Zoya’s father sighed and pointed with that same bloody hand.
She was being kept behind the shipyard in a pen, hidden so that nonweaver employees wouldn’t be alarmed. Not that it was a reasonable concern. The place was empty, evidence enough that Zoya’s father had fired his entire staff and had Zoya assemble the ships alone, no need of costly help anymore.
The moment she saw Nevele, Zoya cried. Scream-bawling, animal-like, but from relief. As if she didn’t know, or had forgotten, how to make happy sounds.
After freeing her, Nevele noticed the girl’s hair and shoulders were crusty with blood.
Seemed she’d been doing a lot of overexerting herself . . .
The girl was eleven, gangly in that preteen stage but more so because of malnutrition—sunken cheeks and eyes. She held Nevele, pressing in and clutching hard.
Zoya’s father was quiet when he saw Nevele coming back around from behind the rusty blue building.
He didn’t say anything, nor did Nevele.
She couldn’t even look at him. Afraid of what she’d do if she did. Even a peek.
But she knew she—unlike Zoya—would be seeing him again.
And maybe he, too, knew that.
So good-byes weren’t necessary.
Nevele and Zoya stayed in a hotel in D’loon. When Nevele said she could order anything she wanted from the room service menu, Zoya was overwhelmed. Took her half an hour to decide on a hot fudge sundae, Nevele never rushing. They watched telly.
In the morning, at first glance, Nevele thought she’d left. She found Zoya curled up sleeping under the bed. They had cake for breakfast.
After a spin through the shops in D’loon, in a new set of clothes—and with a few additional outfits in a new suitcase—Nevele took Zoya to a school. From then until graduation, Nevele paid the bill. She didn’t do this for every weaver who needed her, because none had needed help quite like this.
At Srebrna Academy, a red-haired woman with the curious name of Nimbelle Winter smiled as she greeted them. Nimbelle explained she doubled as the etymology professor—specializing in Platyhelminthes—as well as a fill-in at admissions. Taking the girl’s hand, she promised Nevele that Zoya would be safe and loved and get a good education and a good life.
Nevele told Zoya to keep her chin up and, curiously, Zoya told Nevele to do the same.
Nimbelle Winter thanked Nevele for bringing Zoya, and the moment the front doors closed behind them, the smile faded from Nevele’s face.
Straining to keep from shaking, she turned away and boarded her starship. The faster-than-light drive got a lot of use that day.
She returned to the shipyard.
The girl’s father waited for her. Not by choice. He couldn’t have gone anywhere, packed into his daughter’s metal cage as he was.
Nevele released the brake on the crane. The cage hit the water, its sinking slowed by trapped air. His hands turned white-knuckled on the bars as he pointlessly tried to climb. The hatch on top she’d secured herself, beating its lock with a hammer so it’d keep fast.
“This is murder,” he said just before the water reached his chin, the top of his head crushed against the roof of the cage, final precious inches abandoning him. He seemed no longer angry but restated it in disbelief, seemingly wanting nothing more than for his words to catch Nevele’s hidden heart: “This is murder.”
Mud up to her knees, Nevele raised her voice to be heard as the brown water filled Zoya’s father’s ears. “You invited this. Which makes it more like suicide.”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait—”
The cage slipped under.
Bubbled a while.
Then didn’t.
Raziel giggled. “Well, now. Can’t say I expected that.” The pain dagger seemed intrigued by this brambly corner of her soul and roundly carried on, scouring for similar secrets to taste. “Good choice of schools, though. My alma mater.”
Sliding along the floor, twisting and moaning, Nevele was too sick to speak.
A man stepped into the hallway, and Raziel let her slump to the floor. When her eyes cooperated enough to actually look at him and not roll back in her head, she saw the second, taller man was also wearing a black suit like Raziel’s, and he was similarly slathered in almost-flesh-tone makeup. She could see a resemblance to Clyde, as she had in Raziel: pronounced cheekbones, sharp chin, big eyes.
“What happened?” the man said, noticing Nevele on the floor. “And what’s that smell?”
Raziel, still dripping with broken glass and spirits, stepped over her. “She won’t tell us when.”
“But they are planning on attacking?” said the second man, whom Nevele assumed was Tym.
“They are. Confirmed now.”
Tym worried something in his hand, a small plastic remote.
Raziel nodded at it. “Are we primed?”
“Yes,” he said. “Is the Bullet Eater ready?”
“Outside.” Raziel cocked a thumb over his shoulder.
Nevele let her head loll back and clunk against the floor. Upside down, she could see the emergency hatch. The air lock? But we’re still moving.
“Blow it?” Tym said, reluctance in his voice.
“Blow it,” Raziel ordered. He snatched up Nevele by her hood and dragged her into the air-lock room.
Tym stepped up behind, glancing down at her as she was pulled along ahead of him. His gaze didn’t remain connected to hers for long. He looked over her, to his brother ahead.
“Now?”
“Yes, Tym, now.” Raziel snapped.
“I . . . don’t really understand why we have to do it at all.”
“We’ve covered this. Chidester will have no choice but to move hunting the Odium to the top of his kingly honey-do list. We can’t stop the pirates on our own. We need to paint a crosshair on them.”
“But isn’t there some other way . . . without hurting people?” Tym had a terribly young voice.
“Give it, then, if you haven’t the spine.”
Tym looked at the remote in his hands, agonized, and then held it out for Raziel to take.
Holding it under his younger brother’s nose, Raziel made a show of pressing the button. With the hard click, Tym’s painted face fell. He glanced in Nevele’s direction briefly, then looked away.
The frigate trembled. The vibration on the floor shot through Nevele’s back, almost to the point that the pain eating away at her
was nothing but a faint itch. Maybe Raziel needed to focus to keep her wrapped in pain.
She took the opportunity to flop over and deliver a punch to Raziel’s available knee—the heavy shroud of returned agony leaping from her instantly.
“Raz!” Tym, gangly, all arms and legs, lurched to assist.
Nevele flung out a backhand swing and lashed Tym across the face.
Both momentarily down for the count, she sprang to her feet—just as the frigate began to list, the entire thing canting as if attempting an impossibly hard turn for a vessel its size.
But it kept leaning.
And leaning.
She spotted the gear rack on the wall of the air-lock room: fire extinguishers, inflatable slides for quick unloading of passengers—and parachutes. She snatched one up, kicked away Raziel’s reaching hand as he tried to use the rolling of the room to propel him toward it, and went to the hatch, pulling the chute pack on.
As the room turned, the black-suited brothers slid away from the hatch, fighting to keep stable footing. Just before the wall with the hatch became the ceiling, Nevele leaped up and grabbed on. Her weight wasn’t sufficient in pulling the release lever, so she kicked down, trying to bounce it open, all while struggling to get the parachute the rest the of the way on with her free hand.
Below, Raziel and Tym hit the wall, which was now the floor of the white-and-red-checkered room. Raziel clutched his leg, and Tym pressed his bleeding face. A smear of blood and makeup came away each time he rubbed at his eyes, moaning and sputtering.
Each bounce moved the lever a bit, but the outside pressure kept the hatch snug. Parachute now on, Nevele used both hands, swinging and tugging with nothing to use for leverage. Dangling helpless, she watched below as Raziel got to his feet, limped to his brother.
She watched as Raziel gently pulled his brother’s hands away to see—and Nevele paused in her escape, struck by the horror she’d made of Tym’s face. He’d never see again.
Raziel snarled, gaze shooting upward. He raised a hand, and Nevele felt all of Tym’s agony. It was as if she’d mistaken a wood chipper for a pair of binoculars. Her hand sprang off the hatch handle, and she fell the length of the room, crashing next to Tym.