Pacific Fire

by Greg Van Eekhout

  She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and stuck out her hand.

  “Cikavac,” Sam said.

  “What?”

  “That’s the osteomantic bird he used to make the wraiths. The cikavac. And it was Daniel who processed the bone for him.”

  Em kept her hand out. Sam finally took it. She pulled him to his feet and they continued on, walking away from the wreck of the airplane and the scattered boulders of the giant and the corpse of Sofía Bautista.

  * * *

  An hour’s hike from the crash site brought them to a place where the walls of the Abyss were lower, but still too treacherous to risk the climb.

  “Feeling any better?” Em said. “At least physically?”

  Sam wiped sweat off the back of his neck.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never used that much magic in such a short period of time. Or ever, actually. I’m weak as a baby lamb now. But for a while there I was pretty sexy, wasn’t I?”

  It seemed selfish to joke, but he was desperate for a sense of lightness, to lift himself above the awfulness of the last few hours. Daniel said he and his friends joked a lot during jobs. It helped them keep their nerves under control, and it reminded them of their best asset: each other.

  “Baby lamb is redundant,” Em said. “Hey, what kind of birds are those?”

  Sam shaded his eyes from the midday sun. Small black birds circled in the searing sky. They were little more than dots, but something about the way they jittered in flight set off his alarms.

  Not birds. Bats.

  He grabbed Em by the wrist and raced for the canyon wall. They huddled among some rocks the size of cantaloupes and a scraggly chaparral bush that might have been sufficient to hide a small rabbit.

  Bats didn’t rely on sight. At least not normal bats. They relied on echolocation, and in this case, maybe smell. He went for his kit and shook out a few grams of yellowish powder into his palm and blew it into the air.

  The meretseger serpent was associated with the silence of tombs, and its osteomancy could dampen noise. Sam didn’t know if it would help conceal them from the bats, but without a better place to hide and no way to cloak his scent, he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  Peering through twigs at the sky, he watched the bats flutter in circles.

  “Think they saw us?” Em whispered.

  A dribble of small rocks and sand rattled down the canyon wall, peppering Sam’s hair. He twisted around and looked up. A man stood on the precipice, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.

  He aimed a rifle down at Sam and Em.

  “Got ’em!” he called out, and in seconds he was joined by half a dozen other men and women, all of them armed with black, chunky, complicated-looking guns. Down on the floor ahead, a quad bike closed in, raising a cloud of dust.

  Sam screwed his eyes shut and ignored everything around him. He dug for smells of the sea bottom, for darkness and a rain of biomass falling to the ocean floor. Pins and needles pricked his fingertips, but that was all. No kraken storm.

  The quad bike came to a stop mere feet from them. A bald fat man with a sun-pinked face dismounted, along with a tall, lean black woman with eyes tattooed on the sides of her bald head.

  The hound sniffed the air.

  “Juicy,” she said.

  * * *

  They taped Sam’s and Em’s hands behind their backs, bound their ankles together, and hammered them with fists and boots until they were spitting blood in the dust. Sam was relieved to be dumped in a hot-box trailer connected to the quad bike by a tow hitch. At least no one was hitting him now.

  They bounced along, cooking in the desert heat. Em kicked at the door for hours until she gave in to exhaustion and sat with her back to the steel wall of the trailer, legs curled up, silent.

  “On the bright side,” Sam said, “we’re getting a free ride out of the Abyss.”

  Em made a sound that could have been a moan or a laugh. “I never even pulled my gun,” she breathed, sniffling a trickle of blood from her nostril.

  “Nothing you could have done. They got the drop on us, Slick.” Each rut and rock they rolled over felt like a fresh blow to his punished body. Sam maneuvered close to her. Gently, painfully, he leaned his head into hers and wiped away her blood with his hair. “We’ll be okay.”

  “Oh, Sam. You’re a nice guy, but you’re really stupid.”

  “Now I’m starting to wish I didn’t have your blood in my hair.”

  “Seriously, I’ve been in some fuck-ups before, but this one gets the blue ribbon. Any ideas?”

  They hit another jarring bump and Sam felt bootheels in his ribs and kidneys. His head throbbed with every pulse beat, and he rode up and down waves of nausea. But this had to be better than whatever they’d be facing when the quad bike stopped.

  Yet, he was not afraid. He found that curious. Maybe because he was with Em, who, even beat up and miserable, somehow managed to pick him up. But he began to suspect it was something else. He still sensed things below: large, potent forces of deeply embedded osteomancy. And as the feeling persisted, he started to wonder if what he sensed was under the earth, or under his skin.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said again. “We just have to wait.”

  * * *

  The locking mechanism rattled and someone opened the trailer.

  “Out,” barked a pudgy white man with a cauliflower ear. Accompanying him was an ugly-looking crew, all bad skin and bad teeth and bad haircuts, and all with guns. The pudgy man had Em’s confiscated gun in the waistband of his dirt-coated jeans. Sam wished he knew a way to make it fire remotely and shoot the guy’s pecker off.

  Instead, he obediently stepped down from the trailer. They were at the edge of the Abyss, on a plateau of sand and soil and low scrub. Nearby, a thirty-foot box truck idled beside a pickup truck with a long flatbed trailer and a pair of motorcycles. Quite a little convoy.

  Sharp cliffs stood in purple shadow many miles away. The sun was almost gone over the horizon, and the air felt deliciously cool after the stifling trailer.

  The band of uglies loaded them into the box truck, already crowded with twenty or thirty other captives in the airless dark. No room to sit, Sam stood shoulder to shoulder with the others. The truck bumped and swayed over desert terrain, sending Sam stumbling into others.

  The air crawled with the stink of sweat and urine and vomit, the only airflow coming from a tiny vent in the ceiling. As Sam’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, he looked more critically at his fellow captives. They ranged in age from a woman in her seventies who’d apparently been snatched from her home in her housecoat to a toddler scrunched up against his mother’s thigh. Sam thought of the Bautista children and looked away.

  A few stood out: a middle-aged man with slits in his neck, like gills; a chubby teenage girl with bad acne and a pair of what looked like condor wings growing through carefully seamed slots in her T-shirt. She kept the wings folded close to her back and winced whenever someone bumped into them.

  Sam didn’t understand. He’d assumed he and Em had been specifically targeted. But this was starting to look like something different.

  “Where are they taking us?” Sam asked no one in particular.

  “Heading to the cannery,” said a man.

  Sam squeezed between several people to reach him.

  Round as a walnut, he stood chest high to Sam. He gazed up with giant, unblinking eyes, yellow as a fire hydrant and bordered by black rings. His pupils were half the size of pennies.

  “What’s the cannery?”

  “Cannery? You know. A glue factory. A skinning house. Hooks, knives, hoses, tanks. They cut you open, let you drip out into a pan. Wring the magic out of you. Press your eyes like olives. Dry your skin out, crack it into flakes. Pulverize your bones. Harden your tendons like jerky. Smoke it. Add hickory flavor.”

  “Leeches,” Em said. “We’ve been captured by leeches. Swell.”

  That explained the armed men and women, the hound, and the
truck stuffed with what looked like a random assortment of people. But it wasn’t random. Everybody in the truck had osteomancy in their system. Some were probably just occasional users, ingesting magic for medicine or adventure. Some might be practicing osteomancers. When they confiscated Sam’s osteomancy kit, they probably assumed he was an osteomancer, but hopefully not which osteomancer. He was still drained from the seismic creature, and the hound with the tattooed eyes probably hadn’t smelled his full potency. If they’d known what he really was and how much rare magic was packed in his system, they wouldn’t have put him back here with the rest of the human cargo.

  “Where’s the cannery?” Em asked the owl-eyed man.

  “Towers. Canals. Magicians at war. Whole nests of people, millions of them, all on top of each other, hungry, always hungry.”

  “You mean Los Angeles?”

  The owl-man blinked. “City of Angels.”

  Em shook her head with irritation. “I’ll be damned if I let myself get vivisected just so some limp-dicked accountant from Pasadena can eat my pelvis.”

  Sam nudged closer to her and stood with his back to hers. They brushed fingertips. It was as close as they could come to holding hands.

  Dripping with sweat in the fetid darkness, he shut his eyes and searched his bones for magic.

  * * *

  The leeches opened the box and forced the blinking captives out of the truck and into a stockade beneath blue sky. Gulls wheeled overhead and the algal stink of canals wafted on an oven-dry breeze.

  The stockade’s steel bars rose eight feet high. At one end, a ramp sloped down to a pier. Docked there was a 150-foot vessel with a black, shoebox-shaped deckhouse. Chimneys belched black smoke. A dinghy on a tow rope floated behind it.

  Sam shuffled along with the rest of the captives and tried to get his bearings. Cargo cranes lifted steel containers onto barges. Acres of parking lots separated clusters of drab, rectangular buildings—warehouses and government buildings and freight inspection offices. Fast-food restaurants and gas stations and motels stretched off in the distance to the foot of brown hills fronting snow-dusted brown mountains. Sam had never been here before, but this must be the San Gabriel Grand Port, where the desert roads ended and the Los Angeles canal system began.

  “Never see the capital now,” the owl-man said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Factory boat. They’ll do us on the way.”

  Em came up beside Sam.

  “Anything you can do yet?”

  “Not yet,” Sam said miserably. “I’m sorry.”

  “I really don’t want to be canned, Sam.”

  He supposed they could try to make a break for it, but there didn’t seem much hope with their arms bound and the high stockade rails and the leeches with guns. But maybe better to die now than in a glue factory.

  A leech barked orders for everyone to get in line and move down the stockade. One of the captives, a man built like a lumberjack, decided instead to drive his knee into the leech’s stomach. The leech squealed and doubled over, and the man lowered his shoulders and charged the stockade. Maybe he thought he could hit it hard enough to break through. Maybe he thought he could dive into the canal, and manage not to drown, and swim away before being riddled with bullets. Or maybe he just didn’t want to die by knife cuts in the dark.

  He never reached the stockade rails. A single gunshot cracked, and he fell. Sam didn’t watch, but he heard the chuk-chuk of their cleaver-clubs biting into flesh and bone. He wondered who the man was, and where he was supposed to be today, and who would miss him when he didn’t come home.

  Anger pushed against his skin, like a bomb explosion contained by a barely adequate membrane.

  The captives filed through a chute, onto the deck of the boat. They were met there by the woman with the tattooed eyes. Em was ahead of Sam in line and got to the hound first.

  The hound’s head flicked, but she said nothing as Em moved past her.

  When it was Sam’s turn, the hound turned her head. The black pupil inked on her temple shrank. Maybe it was a muscle contraction, or an optical illusion, but Sam felt as if he’d been truly seen.

  “You have a very special smell.” Her voice was a creamy alto. “I smelled it in Mecca, from miles away. I smelled it in the Abyss. You’re frightened and angry, and your blood smells even more delicious.”

  She paused, waiting for Sam to confess something.

  “Thanks,” he said, as if she’d paid him a compliment.

  She smiled without turning her head, keeping her tattooed eye fixed on him.

  “I wasn’t sure about you at first. I mean, nobody really is. There are descriptions, and there are stories, and there are legends.”

  Em, who was being led away with other captives toward the stern, gave nothing away. To dig in her heels, to turn around and face Sam, would signal that the hound was right, that Sam was something deserving this much scrutiny. There was only a stiffening in her shoulders that went unnoticed by everyone but Sam.

  Sam was mesmerized by the hound’s eye. It seemed to do more than merely see him. It seemed to be swallowing him.

  “I’m known for the quality of my product,” she said. “Most of my acquisitions are beneath the standards of my best customers, and I sell them off cheap. But sometimes I find special items. And I have some very, very exclusive customers in the market for a very special item. They gave me a sample of what I was to look for. Just a speck of essence. Little more than a mote. And it was the most wonderfully potent thing I’ve ever smelled. And do you know what?”

  “I smell like a mote?”

  The pupil closed to a small inky dot.

  “Very much.” She turned to one of her subordinates. “Don’t leech this one. We need to deliver him fresh.”

  “What about the girl?” the leech said, indicating Em. “She was with him.”

  “She doesn’t smell like much. Put her at the front of the line. We’ll use her to calibrate our knives.”

  Sam lunged at the hound. The crack of the rifle butt on the back of his neck was like thunder. Hands caught him before he struck the deck. They were happy to hurt him, but they didn’t want him damaged.

  * * *

  Sam’s toes scraped the deck boards as the leeches dragged him by the armpits. He never lost consciousness, and so he took in the promised horrors of the enclosed deck. Buzzing fluorescents cast a pale blue light that would make healthy people look like they’d been dead for a week. Long steel tables with built-in drains ran the entire length of the deckhouse. Tools were stuck on magnetic strips—knives and cleavers and saws and scalpels and shears and picks. There were power grinders and drills and circular saws. Shelves were stacked with an exotic array of beakers and flasks and jars for storing osteomancy drawn from the bodies. Hooks and hoists on chains dangled overhead.

  “Always a bad idea to tour the kitchen,” Sam tried to say, but it came out as an unintelligible mumble.

  With the exception of himself, no single one of the captives was likely very rich with osteomancy. These were users, mostly of watered-down magical preparations. But their combined magics formed a deep, crackling odor. To Sam’s shame, he found it delicious.

  A row of steel-barred cages lined the bulkhead. They were narrow, not much more than closets to tuck mops or an ironing board in, and each held a single captive. Armed leeches loaded the captives inside, and a single thug with a bayonet-fitted rifle stood guard, a job which seemed to largely involve keeping out of vomiting range.

  Sam lifted his twelve-ton head to find Em but didn’t see her. And now he began to resist. He tried planting his feet, but the leeches, a powerfully built man and a just as powerfully built woman, kept dragging him along. He twisted in their grip and managed only to earn a hard slap in the face. The woman adjusted her hold and took his thumb and pinky in one hand and did something that shot pain all the way to his jaw.

  “Fuck you and your kung fu,” Sam said, and she did something else that made him scream.<
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  They pushed him into a cage. He lunged at the leeches as they slammed the cage door shut, and his face ran into the bars. The guard with the bayonet gave him a reptilian glare.

  Magic should work differently, he thought. It should respond to anger. It should respond to need.

  A whisper from the next cage. “Hey.”

  It was Em. A partition between them blocked his view.

  “Hey,” he whispered back.

  The hum of the engines rose in pitch and the deck rocked as the boat pulled away from the pier. Technicians came down the gangway and took their positions at the table, arranging their tools and making small talk about sports and real estate.

  “How are you feeling?” Em said.

  He knew the full question behind her casual query.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Your recovery time is kind of inconvenient.”

  “It doesn’t take me this long to recover from everything, I assure you.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “You’re totally a virgin.”

  “Not technically speaking, I’m not.” He wished he could see her roll her eyes.

  “Technically?”

  “I think the amount of time I spend thinking about sex ought to count for something.”

  She laughed, just a little bit, and he realized he’d never heard her laugh before. It sounded glorious.

  The guard came back to stand in front of Em’s cage, and she hushed up. He gave a nod over to a technician at a row of switches on the wall. There was an electronic buzz and some mechanical noises, and Em’s cage door sprang open.

  “Out,” snapped the guard.

  And now Em’s bravado shattered.

  “No,” she whimpered. “No, please, no.” As wonderful as the sound of her laughter had been, the sound of her fear and meek despair came from another reality.

  There were noises of a brief scuffle, and they dragged her from the cage by her hair. Em shrieked now, sobbed, and Sam grabbed the bars of his cage, and he shook them and screamed, inarticulate with rage. He begged for the magic in his bones to erupt. He cursed the guard, he cursed the leech technicians, who didn’t even lift their eyes from their work, and he cursed Daniel for being a poor teacher. He cursed himself for being useless.