by Alex Wells
The Bone Collector regarded her, sucking the gravy off one of his fingers. He didn’t have a right to look that normal, she thought grumpily. And she fucking refused to consider his lips in this moment. “All right,” he said.
“All right?”
“Yes, all right.”
Well, she’d never backed down from anything before. “Fine. What I got to do?”
The Bone Collector set the dish aside, then reached out to rest his hand under her chin when she automatically followed that movement. He kept her face toward him and started humming, quietly, under his breath.
“What–”
“Listen,” he murmured.
His fingers were so cool against her skin, and hard, though still like flesh and bone rather than the rock he sometimes became. But there was that feeling of intimacy again, like he was too damn close and about to lean in more.
“I won’t hurt you.”
Defiance had gotten her a lot of places before. She ticked her chin up a little and looked him dead in the eye. “Don’t think you can.”
“Bigger things than me have tried and failed,” he said softly, lips curving in a smile that she couldn’t quite decide was affectionate or mocking. She was about to retort again when something changed in the world, shifted. His eyes, bright blue irises like lakes she’d only ever seen pictures of, black pupils, swallowed her up.
She felt every grain of sand, humming and shifting beneath her, and then that awareness expanded outward, into the currents of magnetism and electricity that churned in the dynamo of the world’s heart, the other energies rushing back and forth in blood made of viscous stone. She felt every capillary and vein and artery and heartbeat, but didn’t feel their locations because the brain wasn’t wired to understand these things. Every sensation transmitted, every pulse of that thicker-than-blood ran through her and dissolved her and carried her and bathed her in so much power that there wasn’t room to be Hob anymore – except no, goddamnit, she was Hob, she’d always been Hob, and she wasn’t gonna stop being Hob for anything–
She felt like she was falling, except the ground was abruptly beneath her, and the endless black sky of Tanegawa’s World above, sparked with untold stars.
“Shh,” the Bone Collector murmured, his hand moving slowly over her hair. Then his face came into view, pale as the moon. Like she was daring him to try to make her dissolve again, she looked him in the eye. He smiled. “Bigger things than me have tried and failed.”
Hob reached up, a vague notion that she was going to slap him on her mind, but her hand came to his cheek soft and slow, and then he turned his face into her palm in a tiny angle of movement that made her heart clench so hard she couldn’t breathe.
She rolled to the side before she had a chance to be any more dumb and moonstruck. “What is it?” The blood that wasn’t blood, the power that was more than fire, that was everything.
“Change made manifest.”
“How? Why?”
He laughed softly. “How and why are you?”
Hob cussed at him, and it only made him laugh harder. She’d get her answer, dammit. If he couldn’t tell her, she’d figure it out when she found this place. You couldn’t feel from the inside where your heart was in your body, but it was still a point that someone could put a bullet through. “But fine. I see what ya mean. That it ain’t so easy.”
“Does that mean I am freed from riding on the back of your infernal machine?”
Hob reached for the coffee cup, which sat beside him: empty. She glanced at the plate: also empty. “Son of a bitch,” she murmured. Then said, louder, “No. Just means you’re gonna have to keep tryin’ till you find something that works. And quit your bitchin’ about my bike, until you’re more useful than it is.”
Of all the asshole things, he laughed. And she laughed with him.
Chapter Eighteen
34 Days
It felt like years since he’d been in Ludlow, though intellectually, Coyote knew that wasn’t the case. He’d been there only a few months before, for some meeting or other that involved Mag. Oh, but they’d all been so young and beautiful then, he thought at himself with bitter amusement. Joking and laughing and drinking, and no one watching him from the corner of their eye, waiting to see if he went mad and tried to rip out their throat.
It was a good thing no one but him could feel that thirst still living on the bottom of his tongue. It was manageable now, something he could ignore most days, but it still crawled through him like an itch he could never scratch quite enough. In bed late at night, listening to Dambala snore, sometimes. Standing in the yard in full daylight and sniffing the air, like he could catch the scent of wet iron like the eagles. At least he smiled through it.
The best thing about Ludlow now, backwater shithole town on a perennial backwater shithole planet, was that none of the townspeople gave him that look. They tumbled around like puppies, tripping over their own feet as they tried to understand the rudiments of hand-to-hand fighting. They watched him with soft, open, earnest eyes like he was some sort of hero, and he was happy to let them keep thinking that. They were eager, most of them took it well when he knocked them over for their own good, and none of them seemed to think he’d bite.
He also engaged in a little mental back patting on his hand-picked teaching squad. Lobo had always been a no-brainer – he’d taken all of the most timid would-be fighters and coaxed them through their awkward smiles into slashing and feinting at each other with grim determination. Geri really was less of an ass when he wasn’t trying to impress Hob and convince himself that her authority was meaningless. And Lykaios rounded things out well, forming a sort of tag-team with Geri so that neither of them got too frustrated.
“You’re doing good work, Coyote,” Mag said, next to him.
He smiled. Maybe the self-back patting hadn’t been entirely necessary. “They’re no longer unconscionably terrible, at least.” Three days really wasn’t enough time to produce a miracle, so he’d take what he could get. “Do keep them practicing the basics. So they’ll be ready when we come back.” That was the compromise they’d worked out – instead of seven days straight of teaching, they’d do three then two then two, to give the miners some time to practice between.
“I think they’ll surprise you,” Mag said.
“I noticed you haven’t been joining the fray. And don’t give me that nonsense about Nick having taught you. I knew both him and your father, you realize.”
Mag sobered. “I got other things,” she said quietly, then gave him a sharp look. “Like you.”
“Oh, that bad, is it?” he said, though he felt rather alarmed at even that oblique reference. Mag hadn’t been treating him like an animal, but he didn’t like the feeling that Hob had been free about his business.
Mag’s lips curled in a little smile. “Maybe not so bad as that. Don’t want to make you feel like you gotta try harder.”
“I’m certain Hob will thank you for that.”
“Was that right, sir?” a large young man who looked like he’d been born scruffy – Omar, that was his name – asked.
“Duty calls,” Coyote said, excusing himself to attend to his own set of students. “Almost, but there’s one more thing…” He grinned as his group, the most advanced of the students – which wasn’t saying much – groaned. He corrected Omar’s grip on his knife and then tapped his knee lightly with one foot. “If you’re going to commit, you have to commit. Halfway doesn’t win fights. Neither dos silly things like honor and rules.”
“Can’t eat honor,” a woman muttered.
He pointed at her. “See, I knew you were the smartest and best looking out of the bunch when I picked you.”
She swatted at his hand. She had to be old enough to be his mother, though presumably unlike his mother, she actually looked something approaching her age. “Now,” he said, “get back in your pairs, and let’s see that again.”
For all that he smiled the most out of the teachers, his students were u
tterly wrung out by the end of the two-hour lesson. He released them with a wave of his hand and an admonition that they ought to practice hard, or he’d be able to tell when he came back. “And we all know what happens to the lazy around here,” he said conspiratorially. That summoned up a chorus of tired laughter.
Omar hung back as the group filtered away. He seemed to be trying to twist his big hands into knots. “Um, sir…”
“Looking for private lessons?” Coyote said, and gave him a cheerful wink. “I don’t think you can afford me.” There were no rules against flirting.
Omar blushed beet red. “No. I mean… yes, but no. Me’n a few of my friends are gonna drink’n’party a bit. Think you… I mean, all of you… would like to join us?”
Partying normally meant gambling, and Omar definitely couldn’t afford him in that case. Coyote had also never believed in mercy when it came to cards. He also didn’t really believe in sleep when there could be cards, either, and he’d always been disposed to like tall men and women, though Omar was a bit miner-pale for his tastes. “If you give me a moment, I’ll check.”
He tucked his thumbs in his belt and swaggered over to the other Wolves, smiling in a way he knew would make them nervous.
Lykaios took one look at him and said, “Hell fuckin’ no.”
“You haven’t even heard what I’m going to say.”
Geri eyed him. “We know that fuckin’ smile. That’s the one that means you’re gonna end up with our paychecks in your pocket.”
“Swore off gamblin’ same time I swore off drinkin’,” Lobo said.
“I’d forgotten you swore off fun,” Coyote said. Lobo’s answer was a rude gesture. “It won’t be the same without any of you there,” Coyote complained. He ought to have brought Davey – no, excuse him, Diablo – and Raff instead. Neither of them had learned better yet.
“You mean your pockets won’t be as heavy,” Lykaios said.
“We’re still headin’ back to base. Early, afore it starts gettin’ hot,” Geri said. “We ain’t waitin’ for you.”
“I’ll be waking all of you up, fear not.” He gave them a little wave and headed back to Omar. “They’re all terribly old farts who have no sense of fun. But you’ve got me, if that’ll be good enough.”
“Sure,” Omar said. “I mean, I’m glad you’re comin’ at all.”
“Where shall I meet you?”
Omar gave him directions to one of the houses near the walls, belonging to his friend Luis. “You any good at cards?”
“I barely know how to play, so I may need you to remind me of the rules,” Coyote said sweetly. “Try to go easy on me.”
Twenty minutes of shuteye and a change of shirt later – something that flattered his eyes a bit – Coyote wended his way through the night-cool streets of Ludlow. The streets were quiet and dim, only every other sodium-yellow street light on. As he turned into an alley, heading toward the walls, he caught the faint echo of footsteps. Coyote cursed himself – how long had he been followed? And how had he not noticed? Stupid. Who would have thought there’d be off-duty miners or Mariposa men hard up enough to try robbery inside the walls?
But he was Coyote. He had a ready tongue and a very ready knife, and thankfully people tended to underestimate him too. Probably because he was a bit on the short and slight side. It was so useful he’d stopped feeling annoyed about it years ago. Coyote ducked around the next corner and turned, keeping his hand close to his knife but not drawing it yet.
Ah, two of them, dressed like miners. Only their boots were way too nice – typical Mariposa issue. Apparently this was to be a covert operation. “Oh, you startled me,” he said, breathing out an apparent sigh of relief.
“You lost?” one of them, a woman, asked. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Coyote said. He liked it best of all when people opened his escape routes for him. “I’m trying to find the hostel, you see, and I think I took a wrong–”
That was the point where someone tackled him from behind. Had they already been waiting here? Had they been even quieter than the first ones? It didn’t matter. Coyote drew his knife and managed to slash someone’s leg – there was a satisfying scream – before a knee ground his face into the rough synthcrete of the street. His mind working a mile a minute, he went limp, thinking that he could fake them out perhaps, and then–
Something sharp and metal dug into his back. He smelled ozone and scorched cloth, and his muscles locked into rigid agony. And as if that wasn’t enough, he felt a needle tear through the wire-tense muscle of his arm, felt the burn of something injected and forced through the already screaming fibers.
Some people had no sense of proportion.
The electricity cut off, and for a moment, he just lay still, muscles spasming. The moment he had any kind of control – too long, this was taking too long – he tried to push himself up, instinct demanding something.
He made it halfway onto his elbows before the ground rushed up to meet him again and he blinked–
–his eyes open to see a blur of steel gray and blazing white light. The world shook around him. Voices babbled in his ears. Oh, and it was bloody cold. His ass and shoulders were smashed flat against an unyielding plane. And – his arm jumped uselessly – yes, those were restraints.
It wasn’t bloody fair, was Coyote’s first coherent thought. Hob wasn’t going to ever let him off base again at this rate, and he hadn’t even gotten drunk for this trouble.
He felt a vicious pinch at his elbow and rolled his eyes down to see past the naked expanse of his chest – lovely, they’d stripped him completely – to someone in a light green medical smock, their face covered with a full breather mask, bent over his arm.
Over his head, a muffled voice said, “Get at least six tubes. The interference is off the scale.”
He rolled his eyes back, but couldn’t see the speaker. But he could smell his own blood, being drained away for who knew what reason. And with every drop, he could almost feel the cells of his body shrinking. Water was life, blood was thicker than water, and his blood was thick as stone.
Coyote shut his eyes and tried to organize his thoughts around the steadily growing panic and thirst. He’d expected to get beaten, maybe wake up in a detention cell. He felt another vibration shiver up through the table – a train. He was on a train. Hell. There was only one place that might be going: Newcastle.
He had to get out of there, somehow. And considering they’d already trussed him up and were sucking out his blood, he wasn’t going to be able to talk his way out of this one.
There’s a way, the thirst whispered to him.
“Shut up,” Coyote muttered. But if given the choice between living to fight another day and going to whatever laboratory-experiment death awaited him, he knew which he’d pick every time.
“Did he say something?” the muffled voice said.
“Impossible. We gave him nearly enough to kill an ox.” Muffled laughter.
Coyote opened his eyes. “Well, I’m not an ox. I’m a bloody coyote.” He felt the thirst that lived in the back of his mind, that ran down the center of his spine, and he stepped back into it like sinking into a warm, wet pool that wasn’t water.
Things became strange, slow and fast at once, like he was there and yet watching from a long distance. He felt restraining straps burst around him like overused violin strings. He heard screaming, saw his hands tear away respirator masks and eye shields, and yes – oh yes, felt his fingers sink into yielding flesh. Hot liquid kissed his mouth, but it wasn’t very satisfying at all. More.
No. He didn’t want to be quite that, even though his teeth itched and his tongue curled. The thirst howled in him, but he was still enough Coyote and not coyote. He could wait to drink for safer waters.
But we will drink. I promise. We will drink.
He sank his fingers into the metal skin of the train car and tore it like he would tear fabric. It screamed and bent, rending to let cold night
air wash over his naked body. One moon smiled at him while the other half-hid her face from the sight of what he’d left in the train car. The stars called out and laughed. Ghostly dunes flashed by.
With a yelp of something like joy, Coyote launched himself into the night and hit the sand running.
Chapter Nineteen
29 Days
Hob had elected to ride for a bit into the night, since one moon was full and the other at half and that was more than enough to see by without the headlight. She promised herself a good rest on the other side of it, and then dinner from her next-to-last ration pack. She needed to fortify herself to ignore the Bone Collector and his endless, steady calm that she wanted to take in her hands and break somehow. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, and the least fair and right out of all of it was that she was still enjoying his company even if she wanted to snap at him every five minutes.
His hands suddenly gripped her waist tight, and she cursed him again for refusing to wear a helmet, because she couldn’t just ask him what it was. She brought them to a hard stop and shoved her visor up. “You got something?”
“That way.” He extended his arm, angled over her shoulder. It had been a long damn time since she’d heard that kind of urgency in his voice.
She checked the current stars and the angles on the moons against her map and made note of the direction – west northwest – then pushed the throttle again, turning them in a long curve. They headed straight for the dunes rippling on the horizon.
For a long time, he didn’t speak or react again, but she figured that just meant she was going in the right direction. Going got slow as they hit the dunes, but she’d been doing this basically her whole life. The motorcycle had always taken care of her.
As she rolled up over the back of another dune, she saw movement in the distance, quickly lost as they dipped back down. She was looking when they came up the next. There, not quite dead ahead – was that a person?
If there was a person running out in the sands by themselves, they were either someone who needed help or someone who needed killing. And while Hob had been trained on Nick’s knee that there wasn’t anything free in life, she’d also been trained by life in the desert that you helped other people in the ways you could because some day it might be your turn to burn in the sands.