by eden Hudson
Poof! Four boxes materialized to my left. They hit the floor with an out of tune clank.
I jumped, sloshing hot coffee onto the leg of my pants. “What the shit was that?!”
Carina sighed. “More boxes.”
“I saw the boxes, genius.” My heart flopped around inside my chest like a fish in a net. “I mean, what are they doing appearing in your house? Did you piss off a magical moving company or what?”
“They’ve been doing that since I got back,” she said, glaring at the new arrivals. “I’d throw them all out, but they’re full.”
“Of what?”
“Shoes, lampshades, dried seahorses, trash, gauze, screws, cookie tins, reader styluses… One was full of old fish tank rocks.” She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. “I’ve stopped opening them.”
“What are you going to do about them?”
“I tried taking them to the Bankside the first couple days, but they’re showing up faster than I can get rid of them.”
“I don’t mean throwing them away,” I said.
“Do you even know what the Bankside is?”
“Yeah, it’s the dumpster of civilization, where the undesirables go to desiccate and die.”
She shook her head at me.
“Oh, what, because I tell it like it is?” I said. “Carina, nobody living on the Bankside ever crawled out of that latrine and none of them ever will, because they’re human and mutie turds. They like their rut; that’s why they made it.” I put my hand up before she could cut me off. “Anyway, that’s beside the point. I’m not talking about taking your junk to the soggy homeless rabble so you can feel like it’s going to good use. I’m talking about magical curses. They’re usually pretty metaphorical, right? When you’ve got boxes magically crowding your house, you deal with your emotional baggage. Should clear it right up.”
“I don’t have emotional baggage,” she said, bringing her cup to her lips.
“What about your unresolved feelings for me?”
She snorted into her coffee.
“It’s only natural,” I said. “You’re a healthy, hyperoxygenated-blooded knight who couldn’t bed me on our first mission together. I’m the one that got away. A handsome rogue. Rich, charming, brilliant, incredible in the sack—”
“Don’t forget modest.”
“Modesty’s overrated,” I said. “After all, she did destroy the First Earth.”
Carina gave that ancient joke the attention it deserved. “Believe it or not, thirty-year-old breakers who drop their partners out of helicopters aren’t my type.”
“First off, you of all people know that my birthday was last week. I’m thirty-one. And before you ask, yes, I did take the lack of well-wishing from you as a personal snub. Second, you know that I’m not some last-class breaker riffraff. You’re just trying to hurt my feelings by calling me names, which is completely ridiculous since you also know I don’t have feelings.” I glanced around her cardboard-stuffed firetrap of a kitchen. “Additionally, you’re really harboring some resentment over this Soam thing.” I shot her with a finger gun. “I bet that’s where your boxes are coming from.”
“If you’re not here to discuss this mysterious business proposition you keep pretending to have, then get out. I’ve got more important things to do today than sit around talking to someone I hate.”
“Like what, mow the swamp? Rearrange your boxes? Wash the gatorachnids out of your hair? You don’t hate me, Carina. Cut the fishshit and just admit that you missed me.”
That deafening blankness radiated off of her. “Speaking of fishshit…”
My stomach knotted into a fist. “You would never have let me in here if—”
Somewhere, an in-room speaker played a notification, and I realized that I could hear the low rumble of a vehicle. Carina swiped her hand across one of the fire pit’s counters.
A projection of a mass-market junker coming down the wooded driveway appeared on the stone surface. She set her coffee on the counter over the picture. The projection persisted for a second, distorted by her cup, then shut off.
“That’s my ride.” She looked at me as if I were some low-ranking knight she could dismiss. “As always, it’s been a huge waste of time talking to you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to wash the gatorachnids out of my hair.”
Out front, a vehicle door slammed.
“You know, no one thinks you’re funny,” I told her.
The house’s front door slid open on its track, and a deep male voice called, “Hey, babe, got company?”
“In the kitchen,” Carina answered.
I grinned. “Ohhhhh, you haven’t had a chance to clean the cobwebs out of your clamshell yet. Why didn’t you just say so?” I stood up and set my coffee cup next to the sanitizer cabinet. “I’ll come back in a couple hours when you’re thinking straight again.”
A second later, a musclebound holoposter boy for Guild genetic tampering stepped sideways through the stacks of boxes into the kitchen—except he was doing it so the I-beams he called shoulders wouldn’t knock them over, not so his extra biscuits and gravy wouldn’t catch.
He stopped just inside the doorway, sizing me up, then cast pale gray eyes at Carina. “Who’s—”
“Is this the infamous Nickie-boy?” I stepped toward him, one hand outstretched to shake. “The brilliant fiancé I’ve heard so much about?”
Carina’s eyes glinted with psychotic fury at our old inside joke.
“The name’s Nick,” he said, his mountain-bayou accent getting stronger. His hand swallowed mine for approximately three days’ hand-time, then barfed it back up. “Nick Beausoleil. I don’t believe we’ve met, stranger.”
“You guys are still together?” I asked Carina. “Really?”
The flash of anger evaporated, replaced by the ghost of a smirk. “Nick, this is Jubal Van Zandt.”
You wouldn’t think a guy that big could move very fast—there’s usually some tradeoff of speed when you overencumber a human skeletal system with muscle—but the second Carina said my name, Nickie-boy turned into a blur.
Boxes exploded across the kitchen as he grabbed me by the throat. He hit me so hard that my head rebounded off the wall a split second before my ass. My heels came late to the party, but they miraculously hadn’t been knocked out of my shoes.
Muscle-boy Nickie’s face twisted with rage. “You’re letting him sit at your table like some kinda—some kinda—”
His fist tightened around my throat when he couldn’t come up with a comparison obscene enough for what Carina was letting me sit at her table like. My Adam’s apple creaked under the strain while my sneakers kicked and scraped at the mold-resistant paint, trying to relieve some of the pressure. It felt like my eyes were going to explode. Everything was turning reddish-purple.
“This here Judas doesn’t deserve a knife in the eye, much less—”
“Put him down, Nick,” Carina said.
The snarl on Nickie’s face deepened just long enough for me to wonder whether Carina had as tight a leash on this overgrown mudpuppy as she thought, then he dropped me.
My legs barely managed to hold me up. I put one hand on the wall. The sudden rush of oxygen made my head spin and green wash across my vision before the regular colors started to bleed back in.
Still sitting by the fire pit, Carina was blatantly not-grinning at me. She might as well have stuck her tongue out and said, See what I can do?
With my left sneaker, I kicked fish tank rocks and shards of brown glass from underfoot.
“It—” I had to clear my throat so I could talk past the bruising in my trachea. “It’s a damn good thing you didn’t knock any of these boxes into the fire in your little rampage, Nicholas. This place is a holocaust waiting to happen. We’d all be extra crispy right now.”
“Why is he here?” Nick demanded. “Why’s he in your house?”
Instead of telling him about the messages I’d been sending ever since her wristpiece account came back on
line, Carina said, “He had a proposal.”
“This—” Nickie-boy spent three seconds and a hundred million brain cells coming up with an insult terrible enough for me. “—pond scum had a proposal, and you were listening to it?”
Carina shrugged.
“Look, babe…” Nickie reached one buckler-sized mitt toward her.
Carina’s expression didn’t change at all, but it almost changed—almost softened. My pupils zeroed in on the almost-sight.
Nickie-boy didn’t even seem to notice. Instead of touching her, his banana-fingers folded back into a fist and pulled away. This dumb meathead couldn’t even see that she wanted him to touch her.
Totally oblivious to everything that had passed between him and his fiancée in the past second, Nickie exhaled a long breath and set to work digging his grave.
“I know mandatory rest and recoup can drive a knight straight-up crazy,” he said, “but it’s about to be over, babe. You don’t need to go looking for a fight with every piece-of-trash housebreaker who comes along.”
“Thief,” I corrected him. “The best thief in the history of the Revived Earth, specifically.”
Carina didn’t look his way or mine. She swiped her thumb at an imaginary drip on the lip of her coffee cup. Without realizing at all that he was mimicking her gesture on a large scale, Nick scrubbed his hand across his jaw.
That was when I noticed the barbwire bracelet around Nickie-boy’s wrist. The barbs had dug a few bloody lines—probably when he did that wrecking ball trick with me and the kitchen wall—but there were several older scratches that had scabbed over. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see faint bands of scar tissue, a paler backdrop to the barbwire bracelet’s newer scratches.
So he was one of those.
“Hey, Nickie, I love a good self-flagellation as much as the next guy, but a barbwire bracelet seems like a bit much, doesn’t it? What’d you do? Must’ve been something pretty bad to warrant that level of self-abuse.”
“Huh?” His gray eyes flicked to his wrist as what I’d said sunk in.
Zero powers of observation, a serious lack of self-control, and a cognitive tempo slower than a brain-damaged hailslug. I looked at Carina, silently asking her what in tarnation she saw in this retard.
She didn’t even acknowledge me. She knew I was looking at her, but she ignored me.
Ignoring me is always a bad decision.
“You cheated on her, didn’t you?” I said. “Got some strange while she was locked up down in Soam?”
Nickie-boy’s fists balled up. The barbwire punched holes in his thick wrist. I braced myself for another charge, but he didn’t move.
“Not that anybody’d blame you,” I pushed. “You can’t be expected to wait forever for someone who’s not even that good-looking in the first place. And I bet it was nice for once not to have to shut your eyes and think of Emden while trying to get that scar out of your brain long enough to shoot your load.”
Nickie-boy glanced at Carina with half genuine concern and half absolute fury. Either I had just described word-for-word his go-to method of getting off with his scar-faced future bride or he was worried I had hurt her feelings. Whichever it was, he was definitely looking for the okay to smear me across her wall again, this time without being called off.
Carina didn’t waste her time meeting his look.
“Get out,” she said to me.
“But the job,” I said. “You’re never going to get an opportunity like this again—”
“Leave, Van Zandt.” She didn’t yell. Her voice was low, and her eyes were the color of glacial swamp ice, like I’d only seen them once before—an instance of which I was the only witness still breathing. “If you say one more word, I’ll kill you myself.”
***
Outside, I started up the ’Shan and put my helmet and ventilator back on, sneering at the hunk of junk parked beside me. Nick Beausoleil really was some inbred mountain-bayou trash. I got that Carina wasn’t into material possessions—Guild knights weren’t allowed to be into anything—but that humility symbol on wheels was stretching the bounds of credibility. If Carina didn’t have cameras everywhere, and Nickie had been worth my time, I probably would’ve keyed the piece of shit. Give the rust somewhere to eat into the frame.
Instead, the ’Shan and I motored back out onto the main road and headed toward Taern. Carefully. A lot of the people who run around on crotchrockets are your standard adrenaddicts. Not this guy right here. I don’t fly around blind curves or drive one-handed like some kind of goon. Even when I’m not on a timetable and can afford the luxury of broken bones, the ’Shan is beauty on two wheels and I’m beauty on two legs. Neither of us is going to end up ground meat and metal because of careless driving.
I put a couple miles between me and Carina’s house. Then I turned onto an overgrown dirt road and parked back in the foliage to lie in wait for my prey.
If we’d had a few more minutes alone, Carina would’ve agreed to partner up with me for this job. She didn’t want me to die any more than I wanted me to die. She had gotten the violence out of her system by attacking me, and right now she was probably getting eighteen months’ worth of sexual frustration fucked out of it. By this evening, she would be back in her right mind and we could get this showboat on the river.
Which was good because, according to the countdown app I’d downloaded to my wristpiece after I left that last plague specialist’s office, I only had eighty-seven to one hundred and seventy-seven days left to prove that I was the greatest thief who ever lived by stealing my life back from the jaws of certain death. I couldn’t find a cure without more time, and I couldn’t get more time without those ancient texts.
The urge to go, go, go rolled up my back like ball lightning. I shook out my shoulders, then shifted from one side of my butt to the other on the ’Shan’s seat. Going off half-cocked never did anybody any good. In a retrieval with this level of danger, protection, preparation, and finesse equaled speed. Without Carina watching my back, I would never even make it into the Dead Estuaries’ sunken city, much less find the books I was looking for.
The high-contrast images of the city were already burned into my brain, but my hands wanted something to do while I waited, so I closed out of the countdown app and flipped through the pics of the ruins that I’d lifted from Guild servers. If you have the untraceable currency on your next digi-black market run, I highly recommend the Silver Platter infoserv tech upgrade. It’s good for so much more than just hacking somebody’s wristpiece and finding out why they aren’t answering your messages.
I noted again the major predators that swam the ruins during high tide—some giant creel, a few goblin sharks, a blur that might’ve been a cuttle. No kraken or leviathan in these photos, but they were always a possibility that close to a sea mouth. Only the creel were still visibly stalking the area in the low-tide photos.
About twenty minutes had passed when Nickie-boy’s junker flew by, carrying two people and dragging dead leaves in its slipstream.
A quickie and out the door? Carina hadn’t been making up excuses about having things to do today after all.
I gave them a good head start, then fired the ’Shan back up and took off. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where two God-fearing, lectio-divinaing, knuckgun-toting knights were headed in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Sure, I could’ve gone back to civilization and waited for Carina’s wristpiece signal to show up at the Guild, but it’s more fun to chase prey than to track its signal on your nav app.
TWO
Back in the dark ages, civilization rebuilt itself around the Guild—first for protection, then because Guild members had been the only people in the reviving Earth with anything of value to trade for goods and services. Nowadays the Guild is still at the center of Taern’s business district, so when Nickie-boy and Carina aimed their ride toward the heart of the city, I cut through some backstreets to beat them there.
I stopped the Mangshan at the mouth of an
alley down a couple blocks and on the opposite side of the street from the Guild building. Nickie’s junker showed up a few minutes later.
Carina was staring out her window. From my angle, I couldn’t see whether Nick was talking or not, but if he was, she wasn’t listening. She was watching.
I felt her see me, felt it in the pit of my stomach like a jolt of electricity. She didn’t react, just stared.
The moment passed in a fraction of a second. Then they rolled into the darkness of the Guild’s parking garage and disappeared.
I puttered down the street after them and into the depths of the garage.
A striped security arm dropped in front of the crotchrocket’s nose, and a guard about half my age leaned out of the booth.
“Business?” he asked, deepening his voice to let me know he was one hundred percent alpha male.
Most people don’t realize that every obstacle they’ll ever face in life is just some form of knot waiting to be untied. You have to thread some ends, pull some loops, and accept that the whole thing’s going to look more tangled before it finally unravels, but if you go at it right and don’t quit, it will unravel. This kid had defensive bruises under the open cuffs of his uniform, a scrolling textbook open on his wristpiece, an obvious lack of genetic augmentation or engineering, and he could barely contain his snarl at my ride. He was about as complicated as a double-knotted shoestring.
“Consultant,” I said. “I’m with the Bloodslinger.”
“Sir Xiao didn’t leave any instructions about a consultant.”
I laughed. Smiles disarm people. Even people who hate you for being rich out the ass.
“Named knights, man! How often do they give you knights on security duty the time of day?” Ha, ha, ha, we’re on the same side. Named knights are such assholes and we’re just a couple of working stiffs. Maybe I even used to be poor as hobo shit like you, but worked my way up to this sick ride and sense of entitlement. Maybe someday you can be like me.