by Andrew Post
He pushed with his hooves, dug his fingers into the striped parking lot wherever his fingers could find purchase.
Fading fast.
He had to get to the street, flag somebody down.
Hopefully someone would notice a crawling guardsman leaving a bloody smear on the ground. Flam wished Clyde or Nevele were here. He felt more alone now, dying on his belly just a scant few yards from the passing drivers’ sight, than ever before. Another coarse scrape of his hooves, another foot painted red behind him.
He couldn’t remember precisely when he stopped.
Then nothing for a while.
And then a face emerged from a wall of golden light, looking down. A Mouflon face, bearded, sagely, with glowing eyes, horns standing meters above his head, beautifully twisted and asymmetrical, as coral grows . . .
“Meech?” Flam said, both scared and excited.
A hand came down.
Flam thrilled at the idea of feeling the Great Mouflon’s loving caress, here to welcome him to the Mountain.
Instead, Meech slapped him across the face.
“Stop smiling like that. You look like a fool. Bzzt.”
The otherworldly glow behind Meech was a work light, and the Mouflon his uncle Greenspire.
“You’re not dead,” he grunted. “Good. Door’s over there.”
Sitting up, Flam looked around, confused as to where he was.
The corrugated steel walls reached high up to rafters. Taped sheets of oil-stained cardboard covered every window in the spacious place. He was in the auto-body garage, where he’d given Greenspire and the Lulomba a home.
At the edges of the single lamp’s glow, Flam noticed only now the Lulomba and their saddled bugs. From hammocks made of old cargo nets and bright blue tarpaulins suspended from the ceiling, each of the bony, hunchbacked cave dwellers regarded him with rheumy eyes. Their heads were slightly turned, ears angled, seeing by listening.
“What happened?” Flam said. Next to him on the floor was his guardsman armor and surcoat. His midsection was banded with multiple layers of gauze. Flam put a hand over the hurt and got to his hooves, following his uncle into the next room.
It’d been a bay for fixing larger autos. The vehicle lift was up, and a stained canvas drop cloth draped over it to create an indoor tent. Greenspire ducked through the opening.
Hissing at the pain in his belly, Flam stooped and stepped in.
Inside was a table piled with columns of scrawled-on parchment, a rickety bed, and several trash bags bulging to capacity.
Greenspire collapsed onto the bed with a huff, hands cupped over the handle of his cane, chin resting on his thumbs. He sniffed to confirm Flam had followed him in and, without even needing to see it, kicked a wheeled stool screeching Flam’s way.
Flam caught the stool and eased down onto it, wincing. He nodded toward the overstuffed bin bags. “You can drop your trash at the chute down the street, you know. You don’t have to hold on to it, Uncle.”
Greenspire either couldn’t hear him or chose not to. “You’re living incorrectly.”
Flam chuckled. “Well, howdy-do to you too.”
“Wearing human clothes, driving their vehicles, insinuating yourself into their world of greed and so-called order. A Mouflon should never let his hooves leave the ground. Unnatural. Bzzt.”
Flam looked around the metal room. It was crowded with skinny, naked people, who were covered in green body paint, and their dog-sized insect pets. “Glass houses, Uncle.”
Greenspire’s face remained set. “I’m a pilgrim.”
“Oh, well, that explains everything, then.” The last night came back to him: the frigate crash in the desert, the call to arms. Meech, what’s going on? Flam started to stand. “I appreciate you saving me and all, but I really need to be going.” Flam ducked to go back through the tent opening.
“I didn’t rescue you,” Greenspire said. “I was out collecting cans when Nigel came and said he’d found my abomination of a nephew lying bleeding in a parking lot, unconscious.”
“Hey now. Abomination? Seriously? They knighted me, you know.”
Greenspire aimed his milky eyes Flam’s way. “You should let it fall. Geyser’s providence cannot be altered.”
“Is this about your critter baby?” Flam peeked out to the garage surrounding the tent to look for it. They often kept it swaddled and hidden away in one of the auto-body’s bathrooms they’d repurposed as a nursery. “Because I know crusher of men was a very popular baby name last year and all, but don’t you think it’s a little . . . blunt?”
“Don’t mock. All around us is a great a coalescing, one thing leading to the next, which will culminate in him claiming his birthright.”
“To crush men, yeah? Am I getting that right?”
“Disrespect after I save your life?”
“Apparently Nigel saved my life. You probably would’ve left me to die.”
“I would, yes.” Greenspire clicked his cane on the pitted cement floor. “But one of the Lulomba, our seer, seems to think you’re going to wake up one day, so I let them waste some poultice for your wound. To save your life, so you’d have a chance to do the same.”
“To save my own life?”
“Yes. By refocusing it.”
“All right, so is that an apology, then?”
“Is that a thank-you?”
Flam sighed. “Yes, I’m sorry. Thank you, Uncle. I mean it. Bzzt.”
Greenspire said nothing, his lips working around deep inside his silver nest of a beard, as if he had an itchy tongue. He’d had that strange habit even before, back when Flam was just a pup, when working something out.
Flam stood at the tent flap, deciding whether to stay for a few seconds more, even if he couldn’t really spare them. He hadn’t visited much lately.
“Collecting cans, huh?” he said, nudging a nearby bag with his hoof. The tent was packed with them, piled into heaps along the canvas walls, some even peeking out from under Greenspire’s bed.
“Yes.”
“Changing them out for spots?”
“Geyser, collectively, drinks fifteen thousand cans of soda, beer, or juice per day. And all of them have to go somewhere. It’s my task, and that of the Lulomba who have volunteered, to gather this potential that’s been tossed away.”
“Potential? Potential what?”
“This space doesn’t suit us any longer.”
Weird topic shift, but okay. “You could return to the mines,” Flam suggested, trying to play along. “You guys were cozy down there, right?”
“We could, but we’d be safe only for a time. The seer has read it.” His focus drifted to his table, which was covered with pages and pages of ink-filled parchment.
“The deposit, yeah, that’s been pretty much the guess since the day Gorett took off with his new friends. But we’re not going to let them do that, Uncle. Me, the Patrol, Clyde, Nevele, and Rohm—we’re—”
“Pride won’t keep you standing. It only makes the fall more surprising.”
Since his uncle was blind, Flam felt comfortable rolling his eyes right in front of him. “Yes, yes, I’m awful. I get it. So are you going to explain the cans?”
“We bring it to Gonn Smithworks to have the tin melted down so we can repurpose it.”
“Repurpose it? For what?”
Greenspire pushed the door open. In the dirt back lot of the auto-body garage, surrounded by a high fence and heaps of junk, was a starship, or at least three-quarters of one.
Only some of the hull had been patched over the skeleton framework, but one could easily discern the shape it’d have once the fuselage and wing sections were complete. Engines tucked under the wings looked plum and at least pointed in the right direction, the cockpit featuring a repurposed auto seat, and overall the welding wasn’t too shabby.
Flam thought, I really need to start paying attention when I visit. Here I thought he was putting together a jungle gym for the bug people.
“You’re m
ore than welcome to join us, Tiddle.” Greenspire fumbled a bit to find Flam’s shoulder.
The Lulomba were busy on the wing, delicately adding pictograms with their fingers, which were coated in gritty organic paint. One was a simple representation of people boarding a winged craft. The next was a craft shooting off, leaving behind what looked like a tree stump—no, Geyser, cut off halfway up its stem.
Flam felt a chill in his heart.
He turned around, took his uncle’s hand, and held it in his. “I really want to talk more later about . . . all this, but right now I have to go. My friends are in danger. Please, if I call Nigel and he comes here and tells you that you need to leave, will you listen?” He bobbed a horn over his shoulder, toward his uncle’s backyard project. “It’s obvious you’ve put a lot of work into this thing, but if people start heading to the docks to get out of town, will you please go with them?”
“There’s no danger, Tiddle,” Greenspire said, the morning sunlight drawing out the pearlescent quality of his eyes. “The enormity in achieving our mission protects, shoots back through time to shield me. This will happen. It has to happen.”
The seven o’clock bell tolled. Flam wanted to smack some sense into his uncle, drag him kicking and screaming away from all this, but right now he had to get back to the station and find a radio powerful enough to contact Clyde and Nevele, wherever they were. That, for Flam, was all that had to happen.
After giving his uncle a quick hug, Flam cut back through the garage, sidestepping the scampering startled bugs, and out the front. He ran the streets, clutching his middle, groaning with every few steps, but never let his hooves stop.
When Flam burst through the Patrol station’s front doors, not one desk was occupied. He found every green-coated man and woman in the break room, focused on the wall-mounted telly.
A suited man holding a sheet of paper was about to say something. Given his expression, something bad.
CHAPTER 14
Like Wildfire
On the Praise to Her as it hurtled above mile after mile of unoccupied desert, Clyde, Nevele, Aksel, and Emer listened. The bandit boy sat crossed-legged on the floor—Rohm on his shoulder, ears raised. Together they remained silent as the broadcast began.
“Adeshka forces, emergency crews, and volunteers attempted to breach the frigate’s hull to get to those trapped inside, but many had either died from smoke inhalation or fires that spread through the passenger compartments . . .”
At the back of the break room of the Geyser Patrol station, Flam stood, hollow-chested, ears twitching in the curl of his horns.
“. . . the intelligence branch of Adeshka security force is currently pooling all efforts into the matter, reviewing security tapes from both the frigate launch and any during the short journey it made over the Lakebed. Evidence points to this being the work of the Odium, with the dining hall of the frigate bearing their Dapper Tom insignia, their calling card . . .”
In the mess hall, Gorett found the entire group sitting at the old console radio in the corner. At first, hearing the newscaster’s voice, Gorett thought it was a new droning only he could hear, before he noticed the radio’s dial glowing alive.
While everyone sat before untouched plates, meals going cold, he remained at the back of the room, itchy and squirmy but still rapt.
Directly before it, Dreck stood, his tri-cornered hat in his hands. Not out of respect, Gorett suspected, but removed mindlessly out of pure shock. His gaze remained fixed on the radio’s glowing dial, never missing a single word of the staticky broadcast.
“. . . King of Adeshka and surrounding providences, Seddalin Chidester, has vowed to exact swift justice on the whole of the Odium and specifically on the one thought to be their leader, who goes by the alias Dreck Javelin . . . ”
Barely above a whisper, Dreck breathed, “I’m being framed?”
“The starship the men used, authorities say, bore the name Praise to Her, furthering speculation that they were in fact members of the Odium. This just in—authorities reviewing the security feeds at the Adeshka sky port have identified the two men thought to be responsible or at least involved in the attack in some way.”
“Oh, this oughta be good.” Dreck folded his arms.
“The first man is Coog ‘Proboscis’ McPhearson, wanted in every city-state on Gleese for murder, kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and blackmail. Distinguishing marks: a prosthetic nose. The second, authorities have identified as Aksel Browne, once a member of the Adeshka Fifty-Eighth militia and—”
“What?” Dreck screamed. “I killed him. I threw him out with my own hands.”
He whipped around to scan the pirates, seeking one face in particular. He found it: Pitka Gorett. “You saw it. How the hell did he live?”
“I . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible.”
“. . . he is rumored to carry an outlawed piece of technology known as the DeadEye and is considered extremely dangerous.”
“And completely unkillable, apparently!”
“. . . if you believe you have seen either of these men, do not approach them. Contact your local Patrol station immediately. A message for the trained professionals, though: King Chidester has put a bounty forward of one million Adeshkan spots, to be rewarded to whoever can apprehend either man and return them to Adeshka—dead or alive. In addition, during his public address he added the statement, quote, Up until now, the Odium have been written off as a nuisance we believed would take care of itself. And I will not even address the rumors that certain individuals of political standing have sided with these awful men. But this latest example of evil has proven that the Odium is a true threat to the whole of Gleese, unquote.”
Aksel leaned forward and switched off the Praise to Her’s console radio. For a few minutes, it was quiet. Nevele, Clyde, Emer, and Rohm said nothing. Just the hum of the starship’s engines, the soft rumble of speedy flight, and the occasional creak of warming metal.
Aksel tore off his tie—swip. He wrapped the black spider silk band around one hand, then the other, his gaze absently on a metal wall.
“The truth will out,” Clyde said.
“Stuff it, okay?” Aksel ripped the tie in two. “They didn’t just announce a price on your head to the entire bloody planet, did they? One million spots, mate. Think any bounty hunter’s going to concern himself with truth? One million spots, dead or alive—like they’d even bother considering. Dead bloke’s easier to transport. Prime for overhead compartments.”
Nevele offered, “Bright side: at least now Adeshka’s taking the Odium seriously. They’ll do something. Geyser’s all but saved.”
Aksel snorted. “Really? Did you actually listen to that quote? He never said they were actually going to do anything. That was king speak for yes, it’s a problem and, sure, I’m upset but since it doesn’t directly threaten my life, I can’t be arsed to do anything about it.”
“Maybe we can explain to King Chidester you weren’t really involved,” Clyde tried.
“Yeah, Mr. Aksel, think about that,” Rohm piped up. “Your name will be cleared in due time.”
Aksel’s eye burned with rage. “Doesn’t matter if it gets called off or not. That sort of news travels nothing short of glacial on Gleese. Most likely the minute that hunter hears the bounty’s been called off will be the same moment he’s sawing the last bits of connective tissue between my head and shoulders. I’m dead.”
“Maybe you should stop thinking about yourself and make use of what time you have left, then,” Clyde said.
Aksel, shocked, looked his way.
“Do something dignified with it instead of worrying about when it’ll be over. You’re not gone yet, are you?”
Everyone turned to Clyde, who was now standing.
Aksel eyed him. Even though the pale man had a point, something about the way he’d said it had jabbed him in a way he didn’t appreciate. Self-righteousness, maybe, or perhaps Clyde just reminded Aksel of the other Pynes too much right then. E
ither way, his DeadEye came unfolding from his head. Something in him at that moment apparently wanted Clyde dead as much as the entire world probably wanted Aksel dead.
Clyde drew Commencement.
“Clyde,” Nevele shouted.
Aksel made his DeadEye retract, but his anger remained unfurled. “It was an accident, mate. Nothing more.”
“Do it, Bullet Eater. You’d be saving us the trip,” chimed a voice in Aksel’s head then. Not Karl.
“What is it?” Nevele said, apparently noticing the shift in his expression.
Despite Clyde still having his sword out, Aksel turned his back to him and padded out of the cockpit, down toward the heaps of cargo spilled everywhere. He braced himself against the bulkhead, back toward everyone as they followed and asked him what was wrong.
His mind spun.
He can’t still be alive.
“You piece of shite,” Aksel said through his teeth to the voice in his head. His hands throttled the hanging cargo straps. “They’ll likely attack early now. If Adeshka can’t stop them, you’ve made yourself lose Geyser. I hope you know that.”
Around him, a riot of noise, an overwhelming hornet’s nest: the roar of the engines, shaking through the steel paneling where he was pressing his forehead, the Praise to Her announcing they were only a few miles out from Nessapolis now. And Nevele and Clyde were still demanding to know who Aksel was talking to.
Ignoring it all, he listened to Raziel’s laugh ring as if he were a relentless demon immune to all exorcisms, impossible to ignore though he didn’t want to believe he was there. “Early? So you know when the attack will be, I take it?”
“All of those people on that frigate,” Aksel murmured.
“I’m saving Geyser. Though I have little trust in Adeshka’s security checkpoints, I have all the faith in the world in their servicemen and women. I provided Adeshka with not just a reason to join the fight but a personal one, a vendetta.