Beautiful Corpse

by eden Hudson

  You could get lost in a feeling like that and never want to find your way back.

  ***

  After my second shower of the evening, I learned a sad fact about life on the base—there was nothing to do there. They had a moldy one-room library I wasn’t allowed to use because I wasn’t Guild personnel, a mess hall whose food was a nasty joke, and barracks with cots harder than the one in the Hospitalers’ on-call room.

  I wandered around the base for a while, but couldn’t find anything remotely interesting, so I sprawled out in a sort of outdoor lounge around a big fire pit. A few knights in swamp utilities were killing time there, sitting in old wire chairs, talking, warming their hands over the fire, cleaning their weapons, and playing on their wristpieces.

  I sent Carina a message letting her know I wanted to make wakes early the next morning, then spent a while on my wristpiece, catching up on the multitude of new PCM articles and infograms flooding the laptic grid, most of which just repeated that nobody had discovered anything helpful.

  Slowly, the crowd of knights who’d been in the lounge when I arrived rotated out until a whole new crowd replaced them. Even the knights who obviously didn’t know each other greeted one another in a familiar and friendly manner as they crossed paths. None of them paid any attention to me. They were brothers and sisters in armor. I was just some civilian drifting across the nav screen of their life. I could walk among them, talk to them, manipulate them, fuck them, gag down their food, and ride in their APCs, but I wasn’t one of them. All hail the inner circle jerk.

  By midnight, I still hadn’t heard back from Carina. I opened my SilverPlatter infoserv app and checked her wristpiece’s location. She was in the base’s main building, likely surrounded by Nick, Jha, Iceni, and that teenage stick bug Kuchera. I could’ve gotten into their precious meeting if I wanted to, but what was the use? Let them have their super-secret club. Whatever it took to make them feel special.

  I didn’t want to, but I checked Carina’s wristpiece’s messages. The one I’d sent her was marked as read. She had one unread from Nickie-boy, but before I could take a peek, it changed to read.

  I grinned. Somebody was passing notes while she was supposed to be paying attention in class. I opened the thread and swiped back to the beginning of the conversation. They had been talking for more than an hour now.

  CX 11:13:08 Did your mom get back to you yet?

  NB 11:15:11 She’s heard out of Tommy and Adelaide. They’re both fine.

  CX 11:15:42 Misha’s up here somewhere, isn’t he?

  NB 11:17:01 Working with the symbios last I heard.

  CX 11:17:36 She’ll get back to you as soon as she hears from him.

  NB 11:18:21 Yeah.

  CX 11:41:28 That’s the fourth time he’s said that.

  CX 11:41:59 Fifth.

  NB 11:42:12 Seventh if you count future perfect tense.

  CX 11:42:18 I do.

  NB 00:09:50 You got me in trouble!

  NB 00:10:11 This is worse than in Jha’s class, tenth year. You’re going to get me sent to detention.

  CX 00:10:12 Oh, poor baby’s got to move his whole arm to check his wristpiece.

  NB 00:13:30 I wouldn’t have to check it if you would stop messaging me!

  CX 00:14:06 Tell that to Jha when he confiscates your wristpiece and sends you to the training room.

  NB 00:16:19 I’m not going back to detention. They’ll never take me alive.

  CX …typing…

  NB 00:16:55 Unless they changed that coed rule.

  Carina erased what she’d been typing and started again.

  CX 00:17:23 I could sneak in.

  NB 00:18:05 Okay fine, I’ll go.

  I waited eight more minutes, but no more messages popped up. The meeting must’ve taken a turn that required their attention.

  I closed out of the app and turned to a knight reading comics on his wristpiece two chairs over. “Hey, buddy. Where’s a good spot to chase some tail around here?”

  ***

  Naturally, the geek reading comics alone at midnight didn’t have any idea where women might be found, but I followed his directions to the base’s main street. According to the self-led tour that kept trying to pop up on my wristpiece, the street had been an assortment of camp follower tents back in the early 800s, but as the temporary encampment developed into something more permanent, the tents had become shacks, then buildings, and now the town even had a name—Northern Front Township 109. Accurate, if not creative.

  The rustic plank exterior of the bar got my hopes up that the place might be modeled after the frontier mead halls from early Revived Earth history, but inside it was just another soulless tavern trying to copy the clubs in the civilized parts of Emden. Low light, standing tables, a long polished wood bar in front of a wall of alcohols. Based on the foods I’d seen around Northern Front Township 109 so far, asking whether they stocked real coffee would be a waste of time. I got a bottled water instead and scoped out the place from one of the barstools.

  Not much to work with tonight. Guild knights of both sexes getting drunk and telling war stories. I saw a couple decent bodies I could’ve cut out of the herd, but I was sick to death of knights. If I had to spend one more second pushing rope into one of those meatheads, I would probably ejaculate spinal fluid.

  Not too far from my seat, the bartender’s apprentice was mixing a pair of glowing orange cocktails with a look of absolute concentration on her face. She was adorable—springy hair, thick-framed glasses, light mocha skin, freckles dusted across her round apple cheeks. In apparent denial that winter was almost here, she was wearing a crop top that showed off a downy slice of stomach.

  I don’t know what it is about women’s tummies, but I fucking love them. Below the bar, my thumb skimmed over my fingertips, imagining sliding over her silky skin and dipping into that tiny navel.

  She looked like the kind of girl who startled easily, so I came in from the side and leaned across the bar.

  “Neat,” I said.

  The apprentice jumped, then flipped the spiral curls of her hair out of her face so she could look up at me.

  Her cheeks flushed, but she smiled. “What is?”

  “That.” I indicated the glowing orange drinks she was mixing. “They look like magic potions from the holos.”

  She laughed, a tinkling sound like ice in a rocks glass. “They’re almost as complicated to mix as magic potions, too.”

  “You look like you’re doing a good job,” I said.

  “At least they won’t poison anybody if I get it wrong. They’ll just taste poisonous.”

  “That’s all alcohol is anyway.”

  “Well, maybe,” she said as if she didn’t agree and didn’t know how to make herself sound like she did for politeness’s sake.

  My ears perked up. There was something vulnerable there, a desire to keep the peace. Maybe for the sake of kindness, but maybe for something a little darker.

  I waited without saying anything else while she lifted a decanter and tipped one glob of what looked like blue jelly into each drink. The blue glob floated there in the middle without mixing into the rest.

  She looked up at me with sincere hope in her eyes. Dark, beautiful eyes that were as honest and sweet as any of the women my father used to bring home. And I knew why she wanted to keep the peace, why she wanted the approval and acceptance of a complete stranger who had showed up out of nowhere and given her the tiniest bit of attention. Something shifted inside my stomach, but I took a drink of water to drown it.

  “I have to take these to their table,” she said. “But if you like, I could mix you one when I get back?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

  ***

  The bartender’s apprentice lived in a two-room apartment over the bar itself. She wasn’t as athletic as Iceni by a long shot, but she smelled much better and she was soft in all the right places.

  She was also desperate to please. If I even blinked like I wasn’t hav
ing the best sexual encounter of my life, she threw herself into making me happy. Probably a personality trait she thought would eventually land her the man she’d always hoped for, somebody to cuddle with and get drunk with and get smacked around a little by but who would always make up for it with flowers or a cheap-ass wedding ring.

  When we were done and I laid down beside her, she practically purred with contentment. Fortunately, I wasn’t staying any longer than it took to get a decent night’s sleep.

  My wristpiece beeped a notification a few hours later, waking me up. I hopped out of bed and found my shorts.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, swiping those bouncy spiral curls out of her sleep-blurred eyes.

  I pulled my shorts on. “I’m leaving.”

  “I thought maybe you’d want to—”

  “Nope.” I shook the wrinkles out of my khakis and stepped into them. “Definitely not.”

  She looked down at the bedspread and picked at a string. “Oh. Okay.”

  “Look, I’ve got shit to do today, but even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t stick around. You were fun, but you weren’t waste-the-rest-of-my-life-in-this-dump fun. You know?”

  She nodded without looking up.

  “Cheer up, kiddo.” I leaned over and chucked her under the chin. “You’re going to make some guy a great battered spouse one of these days.”

  She sniffed once, almost without making a sound. Those sweet girls hate to let you know when you’re breaking their hearts. They had always deluded themselves the longest of any of my father’s victims. Maybe he won’t hurt me again. Maybe I can do something to get his mind off of this. Maybe I can get him back to the charming guy who talked me into coming home with him. Maybe I deserved it that time.

  Let this be a lesson to her, then—to all of those sweet girls—he will, you can’t, it was an act, and if you think like that then you definitely did.

  I pulled on my undershirt, grabbed my blue and orange tourist shirt off the floor, stomped my sneaks on, and left the bartender’s apprentice and her tiny two-room apartment behind, immediately deleting her and it from my memory.

  Outside, I checked my wristpiece. The notification had been a message from Carina. I smiled before I even opened it. I knew what it would say.

  CX 04:29:16 Where are you?

  JVZ 04:31:23 You miss me.

  JVZ 04:31:49 You came to find me when the briefing let out and you couldn’t and you missed me.

  CX 04:32:07 I assumed you were in bed with someone and you would turn up when they chased you out.

  JVZ 04:32:11 You were jealous.

  CX 04:32:18 We’re leaving in ten. Get your gear and meet at the hangar.

  JVZ 04:32:56 This is my leg of the trip. I contracted you. I say when we leave.

  JVZ 04:33:09 We’re leaving in ten. Get your gear and meet me at the hangar.

  ***

  When I got to the hangar, Carina and Nickie-boy were waiting next to the baby cousin of the APC we’d taken to the skinner village. It was about half the length and width, with a windowscreen for the driver to look through instead of a viewscreen.

  I tapped the glass. “Yeah, I’d say you could see the driver well enough to shoot him through this.”

  “That’s UHT double-braided nanoweb,” Nickie-boy said. “Nothing over two thousand nanometers can get through.”

  “So what you’re saying is we’re screwed if they spew any virus but the pikini strain of BFA at us?” I said.

  The right corner of Carina’s lips lifted. “Ignore him, Nick. That’s just how Van Zandt says ‘Thanks for securing safe, state-of-the-art transport for my trip.’”

  “Let’s not stand around speculating on who could’ve gotten us the best ride and who ended up settling for cramped quarters vulnerable to viral warfare,” I said. “We’ve got a sunken city to loot.”

  TEN

  According to the coordinates on my nav app, it was going to take at least eighteen hours to get to my contact’s symbio settlement on the edge of the Upper Swamps. I messaged him to make sure he would still be in the area when we arrived. Symbios were shiftier than a scree slope when it came to being at agreed upon places at agreed upon times, so I was planning to send him a message every couple hours until we drove up to his front door.

  In the meantime, there wasn’t much conversation going on between Carina and Nickie-boy. They sat in silence, only opening their mouths every so often to say something about the landscape or to continue tedious conversations I hadn’t previously been involved in and couldn’t have made myself care about if my life depended on it. After about twenty minutes’ worth of that, I broke.

  “Holy balls, you guys, this is boring.” I scooted forward and leaned into the front like I had in Nickie’s piece of shit car the other day. “For the love of dry land, entertain me.”

  Carina glanced back from the windowscreen. “Don’t you have a washer or a coin you can play with?”

  “No, I demand a story. From Nick. No offense, Carina, but your stories are all romantic nonsense, and they don’t indicate that you have a very good grasp of reality.” I bumped Nickie-boy in the arm. “I mean, she had me believing you were some kind of dimwitted siltbrain and that her mom was a psychotic asshole who liked to scare little kids.”

  Nick’s face shifted from momentary confusion to a nostalgic smile. “Sir Siobhan did love to scare little kids. She told us this one story—” He looked at Carina. “—the one about the knight and the tender-hooks? I still won’t take a leak in the swamp after dark without a flashlight.”

  Carina grinned. “You think it’s bad for you? I’ve got to pull my cammies all the way down when I go. All you have to do is open your fly.”

  I tapped my toes inside my sneakers, then asked, “So, what do you think, Nick? Did Carina get it from her mom? Is she just like Sir Siobhan or did the persimmon fall far from the tree?”

  Nick looked over his shoulder at me. “Get what from her mom? The crazy?”

  “No, that’s obviously genetic. Her mom was a psycho, she’s a psycho—it’s not cyborgcromantic science. I’m talking about the way Carina handles people. You’ve surely seen it before. Maybe in class whenever you both should’ve gotten in trouble but Carina got off because the teacher liked her more? You said she was good at interrogating people. Could mommy handle ’em as easily as her little Bloodslinger?”

  Nick’s head rocked back on his meaty shoulders as if the realization had just hit him. “Oh, all right, I see where you’re going with this. She’s got you convinced she can mess with people’s minds.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Maybe she messed with mine in order to convince me.”

  Carina snorted.

  “Maybe so,” Nickie said, grinning as if he and I were sharing some kind of joke. “Yeah, she’s great with people. That low-contact interrogation paper the TE teaches their investigators is purt near a user’s manual on humans and muties. I sure as heck couldn’t do what she does.”

  My ears strained upward at the tone of his voice. There was a but coming.

  “You have your doubts that she does anything at all,” I said.

  “I didn’t say that,” Nickie-boy said. “Nah, I don’t doubt that she can build rapport faster than anybody I’ve ever met when she wants to. I just don’t know that there’s much to what she does besides that.”

  I shot him with a finger gun. “I’m going to need you to explain that one further, big guy. Not sure I grasp what you’re saying.”

  “To say that she can use mind games to influence people into doing something they wouldn’t normally is kind of a stretch,” Nick said. “I’m not saying she can’t talk them into thinking she’s their best friend, but that’s what everyone does when they want something.”

  I looked back and forth between them. “Wow, now we’re really getting into some fascinating distinctions. So, do you think your future wife is lying about what she can do?”

  “I didn’t say that, either.” He shot a condescending grin at Carina. She w
as smiling the annoyed smile of someone who’s been through this argument a thousand times before. “I believe that she believes she can influence people.”

  “You think this lady here can influence a murderer into confessing his crime, but not, say, a teacher into letting her out of detention?”

  “Which I did,” Carina interjected. “Several times.”

  I turned back to Nickie-boy and raised my eyebrows, demanding a response.

  “Well, yeah, but look at who her parents were,” he said.

  Carina rolled her eyes, but she wasn’t getting angry. This was just another day in the life to her.

  “You think it was all Guild politics in her favor,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Sure didn’t hurt.”

  “Where’s your evidence?” I asked.

  That ugly mug pulled into a sly smile. “She couldn’t influence those Soami SecOps into letting her out of prison.”

  “Oh, shit!” I bounced back against my seat and slapped my hand across my knee. “He’s got you there, Carina!”

  “That,” she said, “That was politically motivated because of who my parents were. The school stuff was because I knew how to talk to our instructors. The work stuff—”

  “Is because you’re good with people,” Nick said. “Yeah, we get it, babe. We all think you’re a special and wondrous creature with amazing superpowers.”

  “Yeah, babe,” I said. “You’re just good with people…when you want to be. Makes perfect sense to me.”

  Carina shook her head, her full lips pressed into a hard line. Now she was starting to get pissed.

  “I bet she thinks she’s done it to you, too,” I said, elbowing Nickie-boy in the deltoid.

  “I’m not saying that she hasn’t.” Nickie held up one hand, half placating, half negating. “Just that I’m no unbiased subject, and that she’s never talked me into doing anything I didn’t already want to.”