by F P Adriani
Tan’s quiet voice finally broke through my thoughts, which had been bordering on frantic.
“Pia?” he asked.
“Yes?!?” I responded fast, thankful to have something outside my mind to occupy my mind.
“Here’s the thing: no matter what happens, I love you.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat—or at least I tried to swallow it, but it wouldn’t budge. I felt a tear painfully slide from my right eye, and my hands struggled toward him beside me, finally managing to grab hold of his hand with both of mine. It was an awkward clasp, what with both our arms being bound behind us. But an awkward clasp was better than no clasp.
“I love you too,” I said now, squeezing his hand harder, and while doing so, I realized his hand felt almost as sweaty as mine. “Tan, I know we can’t move very well, but do you have a flashlight?”
“Where? In my nutsac? My parts can barely fit inside this tight getup. Mike must think I’m skinny as a stick.”
“You always do look so slim,” I said, trying to picture him in my mind, but having a difficult time focusing on doing that. My heart was pounding too hard again, making my thoughts jump all over the place…. I sighed. “Just thought I saw you slip something in your jacket earlier—when I came out from the bathroom.”
“That was my wallet,” he said.
Suddenly I felt a change beneath our asses; the vibrations ceased. Tan must have felt it too.
“Something’s happened,” he said.
But before I could respond, there was a clicking sound, and then the room’s doors opened again, revealing The Pirate’s backlit form. I wanted to shoot up off the floor; I tried but I couldn’t. Tan twisted around to help me with both his hands, and a moment later, we were both standing. I’d much rather directly face whatever frigging shit would be coming—face it on my feet.
The Joker emerged from behind The Pirate, and then three more people walked in, three wearing-robes people. One stood in the room’s center, the two new ones stood on the right, and the two old costumed ones on the left. The robed ones all wore different-colored robes.
My heart was doing its crazy pounding, and I shot a glance at Tan’s profile as I licked my lips fast. Inside the room, I now expected to find—I didn’t know what. It still wasn’t light enough to see everything very clearly. But I was tense about this whole fucking thing for more reasons than just the kidnapped-into-the-dark bit.
A yellowy light came on from the front of the room, and now I saw that Tan’s superstill face looked as if it was just…waiting. I couldn’t read anything else there. He just looked numb.
I turned back to the others, saw the middle robed person’s reddish hair poking out of the robe’s gray hood. Hu. Someone shut the door behind her now.
“We need more light,” she said to the room. And then another light—a white one—came on from behind me and Tan, the light revealing that the man Chuck from that cave stood on the right.
“Good enough,” said Hu at the room. Her pale hands lowered her robe’s hood. Then she said, “Thank you, Senda, for meeting me.”
“Thank you!?!” I shot out, spittle covering my chin and my body twisting so my tied hands were visible to Hu for an instant. “This wasn’t supposed to be the meeting place and this is no meeting! You bound and forced us here, took our guns—”
“What?” she asked sharply, her head turning to The Joker.
He was no longer wearing a mask; his agitated eyes looked back at her. “They wouldn’t come—”
“No matter,” she said, ice behind her words. “Give me all the guns you have—both of you.” She held out her hand, and just as she did so, I saw Chuck whip out an even bigger gun than The Joker had. The Joker’s face now looked like a billboard advertisement for nervousness.
Hu said to him, with a bit less ice, “I’m not going to kill you.”
His eyes were still jumping around as his hands slipped under his belt, but he finally handed over two guns to her. So did The Pirate. And then she handed them all to Chuck—fast, as if she couldn’t bear holding them.
Chuck secured the guns in both of his arms, which at first seemed quite strange because he’d only had one arm the last time I’d seen him. Apparently, at some point since, he’d been fitted with a prosthetic arm.
My eyes fell on Hu as she did a sharp sidelong nod at me and Tan, but said to the woman beside her, “Shayla, undo their wires now.”
“They’re both new,” Hu said to me as Shayla worked behind me and Tan. “They’ll learn that when I tell someone to do something specific, I mean do that only. No revising of my words, no improvising. I told them no guns. We’re not supposed to be adversaries here, you and I. I wanted you to come here with trust. If you were too antsy to come the first time, they were supposed to back off and tell you to set up a new meeting with me when you were more comfortable.”
When both my arms and Tan’s were finally free, I rubbed my wrists, then I yanked off my damn mask. It was sopping wet, so was my neck. Tan didn’t look much drier than I must have looked. But he didn’t pull off his mask. He just still-as-a-lamppost stood there.
To Chuck now, Hu said, “Slide her guns over to Senda.”
I watched as Chuck bent forward and, with mostly his good arm, did as Hu had said.
At first, I remained completely still, both shocked at their actions and afraid this was some kind of trick.
Then, oddly, Tan moved before I did. His eyes on Hu and Chuck, he picked up my gun first and handed it to me. Then he took his, shoving it into his green belt.
I sighed and said in a dry voice, “Everyone’s being so chummy tonight.”
Tan knew Hu a lot better than I did; if he felt she was telling the truth about not wanting to hurt us, she probably wasn’t lying there.
Reluctantly, I slid my gun back into my ankle holster.
“Good,” Hu said then. “Now we can get down to business. You two,” she turned to the two young guys, “get out.” Chuck brought his big gun over toward them, and all three of them disappeared through the doorway behind Hu.
Was Hu for real? Two times I’d run into her and both times I’d been bound by her henchpeople. And then she later claimed that the restraining shouldn’t have happened. Fool me once, okay, what a fool. But fool me twice? That would make me a complete fucking moron.
Maybe this was just Hu’s modus operandi? Like to gain the trust of her captives by playing good-captor, bad-captor? Either that or she was really fucking incompetent when handling her goons. I didn’t know what the hell to think….
Chuck strode back in. He nodded at Hu.
And then she said, “First thing’s first, Senda—who’s this?” Another one of her sidelong nods, only in Tan’s direction now.
“The boyfriend,” said Chuck, his voice deep and firm.
“I can speak for myself, thanks,” spat Tan.
Hu just looked at him now, her eyes narrowing, tension in the air between them, a tension I did not at all like.
“Yeah, first thing’s first, Hu,” I cut in snidely. “Stop fucking calling me, Senda.”
“Then you stop calling me Hu. It’s Arlene or Princess.”
I laughed, a big laugh. “Princess! Where the hell did that—”
“Maybe I’ll tell you sometime how that happened. But now, I remember. Tan Onyx, correct? Chuck did tell me. I know of all your friends, Pia,” Hu said, and my stomach lurched a bit at her cryptic statement. At least it sounded cryptic as it echoed in my head. Nell, Derek, Roberto, Mike, Darla—I really didn’t want Hu to know any of them.
“Leave my friends alone,” I snapped now.
But she sighed a big sigh. “You still don’t understand me, do you?”
“What’s there to understand?” Tan spat again.
Her eyes shot over to him a second time. “Why do you sound familiar to me? Remove your mask. I won’t talk to masked eyes.”
Tan was doing his lamppost impression again, but he finally sighed and took off his mask.
&n
bsp; Hu’s eyes turned into tight little slits now. “Wait a minute…” she said slowly.
“Recognize me, huh?” said Tan.
And now a “What’s going on?” came from an exasperated-sounding Chuck.
Hu’s eye-slits widened back to normal-sized eyes, and she nodded slowly, still watching Tan, her mouth a slightly lopsided smile now. “Yes, um—Tan. Yes. Oh yes. Tan Meyer Ming though, when we knew each other. I don’t remember any Onyx.”
Now my eyes shot over to Tan, only mine felt huge in my head. “Meyer Ming?” I demanded, but he wouldn’t look at me at first.
Then he sighed again when he finally turned my way, his eyes looking hugely orb-like now. “My real full name is Tan Meyer Ming Onyx. But I stopped using the Meyer Ming.”
Wonder of all wonders, it seemed Hu and I were in the same situation: apparently, he’d never told her about the Onyx, and he’d never told me about the Ming. Or the Meyer.
We’d been sleeping together for over nine months, and he’d never thought to reveal his whole real name to me. Very nice.
My furious face stared at him. I was about to say something when I spotted the look on Chuck’s face, the murderous look on Chuck’s face, the murderous look fixed on Tan.
Uh-oh. Fucking wonderful.
I looked back and forth between Chuck and Hu, and now I noticed something more between them that I hadn’t noticed the first time in that cave.
What a mess this “meeting” had turned out to be. I had been pushed around, bound, insulted, and now humiliated because of my boyfriend, and right in front of his fucking ex to boot.
Was there a tension-free corner in the room I could turn to…?
My eyes fell on the purple-robed woman Shayla…and now I recognized her too: the woman with the bright blue eyes. She’d been one of my cave-captors. Had Hu brought the same people from that time so she could intimidate me, or make me feel better at seeing familiar faces? Or were both Shayla and Chuck just upper-level thugs in Hu’s menagerie of madness? If there was indeed something important to discuss, something “dangerous to Diamond,” maybe only certain of her people should hear it. Yet she’d trusted those other two bozos when they supposedly were new.
“What’s going on here?” I demanded now, fed up with everything and everyone at that moment. “You wanted a meet-up, so here I am!” I spread my arms in a dramatically obnoxious flourish. “If someone doesn’t start talking in two seconds about why I’m goddamn here, I’m taking a flying leap off this transport, especially because it feels like we’re anchored somewhere.”
“We are,” said Hu, nodding. “I would have shown up in that hotel, but then I learned someone I’d known too well was staying there. I couldn’t take the chance. The best-laid plans sometimes don’t turn out to be the best-laid plans. This started off wrong tonight. But no matter: we must move on.” She turned her head from me and said to the air, “We need the chairs in here now.”
Almost immediately, the two bozos from earlier shuffled in. They moved around the room fast while they set up folding chairs; their eyes hung low to the floor. I didn’t see any bruises on their faces or arms, but they appeared totally beaten down in spirit compared to earlier. They also wouldn’t look either me or Tan in the eyes. I doubted they were afraid of us. They must have been afraid of Hu.
When they’d finished setting up the chairs in a circle, Hu said to them, “Pull the shutters across now.”
The two men walked to near the doorway and closed the door; then they pushed some buttons on the left sidewall, which slid a huge room-length panel across the doorway’s wall. Then I felt a shearing motion under our feet—apparently from outside the transport.
“Good,” said Hu. “Now this room’s as soundproof as possible. Sit down.” Her hand motioned carelessly at the chairs as she moved to the left a bit.
Tan sat first before anyone else, his face sagging in relief as his ass hit the chair. I certainly wasn’t going to let Hu sit near him, so I had no choice but to sit beside him on his left, even though, right now, I kind of wanted to sock him in the nose. Chuck then sat to my left, Shayla sat to Tan’s right, Hu sat between Chuck and Shayla, and the two young standing guys hovered in the background.
This close, I could see Hu’s heart-shaped face looked thinner and paler than I’d remembered, and I could have sworn it looked more tired too. Inhaling sharply, she clasped her hands together as she straightened in her chair.
“Diamond is a unique place,” she began. “Hera and the moons here have their uniqueness too, but they don’t give so much strength to matter like Diamond does. Amy Castano told me she found the reason for that Diamond strength.”
The room fell so silent, I thought I’d gone deaf. I couldn’t even hear my own breathing…not surprising: I’d been holding my fucking breath.
Tan spoke next, and I saw a spark of something in his left eye. “What reason?”
Hu glanced at him fast then glanced away just as fast; her pale brown eyes fell on me. “That, I don’t know. That’s where Pia comes in. And Julianne. Amy would only tell me so much and then the information stopped. I’ve got part of the map. But I have no specific locations on whatever the map means. I’m assuming it holds the cause of the high matter density here.”
“This sounds like baloney,” Tan said.
“Ar, I’m afraid I really have to agree with him,” said Chuck, giving Tan the evil-green-eyed-monster eye. I’d almost laughed at the “Ar” nickname, but Chuck’s looking at Tan with such animosity really didn’t thrill me. “We’re not pirates going treasure hunting,” Chuck added now. And, again, I almost laughed as I glanced at the pirate idiot standing in the corner.
Hu sighed. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But Amy believed this; she seemed certain. And now she’s dead. And the other map piece has been stolen. Apparently, I’m not the only person who thinks there’s something to this.”
“Yes,” said Chuck, “but you may have more information than they do. They might just think it is a treasure map.”
Before anyone else could say anything further, I did, because now I’d been reminded of something. “And here’s a newsflash: I’ve seen video of your John getting back into his car outside my office after he disappeared that morning.”
Both Hu’s and Chuck’s heads whipped toward me. Then Chuck jumped up from his seat, rushed behind Hu’s chair, and swiftly turned his big red-robed back to us. Considering the forward motions of his shoulders and upper arms, he was probably pushing his real hand into his prosthetic one—pushing hard.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked when neither of them would speak.
The silence remained for a moment, till Hu broke it. “John is a distant cousin of Chuck’s. We thought we could trust him. We also thought he was probably dead. In a way, this is worse.”
Feeling frustrated now, I looked between her and Chuck. I really did not want to deal with anyone’s personal shit—this was getting too soap-opera-ish for me to handle. Shit, my whole life had become that way on this fucking planet….
Still, in for a penny, in for a million.
So I said to Hu now, “I’ve been thinking that people don’t need any coordinates. If they’re smart they can just find out Castano’s itinerary for when she made the map—for where she was. They can find that out, and so can we. Then whatever these locations are, maybe they can be extrapolated from her itinerary.”
A sound came from Hu—half-laugh, half-grunt. “You were on Earth too long. Diamond’s five times the size—areas here even Sanders won’t set foot on because they’re so dangerously dense with razor-sharp plant growth. The map piece I have—the ambiguous location there—the whole area is just not easily accessible by ground. And what good is by air? We’ve ultimately got to get to the low ground. That much I’m sure of.”
“How?” I asked, frowning.
“Because. The piece I have—there just isn’t anything higher than near sea-level for hundreds of miles around that marked spot.”
“But,
like you said, the map is vague; then so is the location.”
“Not for this area,” said Hu, fixing me with a hard look.
I suspected the area Hu meant must have been one of the giant flat sandlands: The Razor Grasslands—which were heavily populated with sandbarb plants. At least that was the only topography I could think of that would fit her description. The sandlands were also among the most hostile-to-human-life places on Diamond.
“No matter,” Hu continued, “we can’t roam so blind. We need Julianne’s trust to tell us more information.”
“Assuming she has anymore,” I said. “And assuming she’d give us anymore. And I have no intention of taking anything without her permission.”
“You don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation—”
“No, I don’t trust YOU, Hu—Arlene—whatever the hell you want to be called.”
“Then don’t give me anything. Just you get the information and we’ll take it from there.”
“Yeah? Where will we take it? The map piece I’ve seen is an impossible trek, and your part sounds impossible-squared. Even if something important’s there, would anyone ever find it?”
“We would,” Hu said in a confident voice.
“Well, I’ve got something else to find—more correctly, someone else. And not on Diamond.”
“Yes, Hera,” Hu said, frowning a bit, her cold eyes staring at my face. “When do you leave exactly?”
I hesitated a moment, then I did my usual sigh whenever I gave in to Hu. “Tuesday morning.”
I felt Tan move beside me; he, too, was staring at me now, and from the corner of my eye, I saw his taut pale face did not look happy.
“That isn’t much time,” Hu responded to me. “But now your trip reminds me—of something not good. The video you saw with John. I was a bit suspicious of him at first, then I subsequently got more information that quelled my suspicions. But, the truth is: this past year, John had done business of his own on Hera.”
“What business?” I said sharply.
“The what doesn’t matter.” She fell silent, her eyes looking many miles away for an instant. Then: “I’ve changed my mind: your going to Hera isn’t insane. You should go, but not alone. I’ll send one of my—”