Beautiful Corpse

by eden Hudson

  There wasn’t anywhere to go in this rhizome. No nightlife to investigate, no trophies to lay without the risk of parasitic infection. I slipped my hand into my hair and scratched my scalp. Skin cells built up under my nails in satisfying wedges, so I dug in harder. Eventually wet tissue joined the dry skin cells, and I had to make myself stop before I scratched a bald spot.

  ELEVEN

  “Apologies,” a lilting feminine voice with a symbio accent drifted through the blackness. “Burrows Short Day returns from the hunt, Night Eyes. He waits to inform you and your Metal Skin guests over a fast-breaking meal.”

  “Gratitude,” I said in her native tongue, sitting up in bed and looking around.

  I don’t dream—I’m not even sure dreams are real; no one I’ve ever met has been able to prove that they are—so without light to reveal the scene around me, I couldn’t tell if I had actually fallen asleep or just drifted in a hyper-relaxed state for a few hours. Whichever it was, I felt rested.

  Sometime during the night, two symbios had taken the bunks on the central wall; I could see the flet in their spinal columns glowing beneath the covers. Over on the opposite wall, the shadows of Nickie-boy and Carina were climbing out of bed.

  “Gratitude received,” our guide said, blinking graciously.

  “Give us a few seconds to freshen up,” I told her. “Then we’ll be ready to meet with Burrows.”

  Nick went straight to the toilet corner while Carina started pulling clothes out of her duffel bag.

  After I had emptied my bladder and dressed in a pair of khakis and a flattering but pointlessly colorful lime and pomegranate purple tourist shirt, Nick and I stepped out into the hall with our guide so Carina could change clothes and probably take that dump she’d been holding in since the night before. Iron stomach or not, dead parasite gravy will shoot right through you.

  When she came out, our guide led us through the rhizome to a dining room—different from the one we’d eaten in the night before, according to the layout in my brain—where my contact sat at a table, waiting for us.

  “It is our honor to be witnessing your return to the rhizome, Night Eyes. We mourn your father, Eyes of Stone. He is well-known among us, is being well-known among us, and will be well-known among us. In three times, we venerate Eyes of Stone. We are feeling pleased to extend his lifelong welcome to the son,” Burrows Short Day said, repeating the ceremonial responses he’d sent to my requests for information and blinking a welcome with eyes the incandescent green of lightning bugs. The coloring was his genetic right to rule, the parasitic equivalent of a divine blessing. Because of his fifty-five-gallon drum of a stomach, he didn’t so much bow over his clasped hands as he nodded over them. “Has the blessing and convenience of bioluminescent sight been offered to you yet?”

  “Yes, it has,” I said, shooting him a finger gun but withholding the wink because of that particular twitch’s cultural significance. “I decided to go with a scenario where I retain control over my mind and body, but if that ever changes, I’ll let you guys know first thing.”

  “Only the blessed few are taking the light into themselves,” he intoned solemnly. “Let us be breaking the fast of night while we are exchanging information.”

  We sat down to a breakfast of sautéed morels and wild onions that hit the spot pretty damn hard. Ignoring the fact that they recycled their own dead buddies into the meat dishes, there were aboveground restaurants with Sarlean stars that couldn’t match this rhizome for food quality.

  “Compliment Spreads Forever Like the Sky for me, Burrows,” I said. “Her cooking is excellent, as always.”

  “She will be receiving your compliment,” he said around a mouthful of the meal in question. “Your messages ask for information on the Dead Estuaries, Night Eyes, but we are not sure of the specific questions you are wishing to ask. Please be enlightening us.”

  I nodded and swallowed what I had in my mouth. “Your people haven’t traveled into the Dead Estuaries, is that right?”

  He blinked his agreement.

  “Are there any tribes here who have?” I asked.

  “It is a dangerous water,” he said. “The creel and the cuttle grow strong and strange feeding on the paper magics our neighbors are drowning there.”

  “Have you heard of the Garden of Time?” I asked him. “Is that a story the symbio have concept of? A place where time is grown, stored, and protected?” Then, just in case, I switched to his language and repeated the question.

  Burrows Short Days blinked a request for my patience, then considered this over several bites of mushrooms and onions.

  “A Garden of Time is not being known in this rhizome,” he finally said. “If it is being known in others, the inhabitants of those rhizomes do not tell us.”

  “Gratitude,” I said, emphasizing this with a blink. If they didn’t know about it and hadn’t heard of it from anyone else, chances were good that it wasn’t the passed-down legend of some ignorant pagan tribe.

  “Gratitude received.” He opted for a deep nod over his fork rather than standing to bow.

  A few seconds passed in silence while we continued to eat. Then Carina spoke up.

  “When we are traveling into the Dead Estuaries, what are you thinking the biggest threats to our safety will be?” she asked.

  Burrows Short Day ticked them off on his square fingers. “The unnatural strength of the creel, the unnatural cunning of the cuttle, the trapped souls of the drowned magic workers, the seeping oil of paper magics, which is making everything twisted that it touches.”

  “The creel,” Carina asked. “What are you using as weapons against it?”

  “Its armor is being as strong as yours, Metal Skin, and its chelicerae are crushing armors stronger than yours. The only way of killing one is to be puncturing the center plate in the foreleg that holds its vitals. Our hunters are using amentums and boom-tip spears.”

  Carina blinked her thanks, then asked, “And the cuttle? What is its cunning?”

  “It is speaking in the voices of the ones we know to be paralyzing its prey. Some claim it is even wearing their faces, but none go close enough and survive to be saying for sure.”

  They exchanged and received one another’s gratitude through more blinks, bows, and spoken words.

  In return for the information he had given us, Burrows wanted us to listen to the hard sell for the flet. I pretended to listen while I finished off another helping of breakfast. To all appearances, Carina was as enthralled by the sales pitch as I was.

  Nickie-boy was a different story. He couldn’t keep the incredulity off his face while Burrows extolled the euphoria and freedom of having the light within your body.

  “But what about your host?” he asked. “If he wants to do anything, doesn’t he have to ask permission from you first? How is that freedom? It sounds like a short leash with a choke collar on the end. What if he’s unhappy with your orders? Does he ever fight you? Do the two of you ever get into disagreements? How often do you take over someone who resists your control?”

  “The blessed few who are taking the light into their bodies are rarely resisting, and even those few within a few are not resisting for long,” Burrows Short Day said. “The flet is providing a euphoria that is unlike any other, and our hosts succumb to it joyfully. It is the fulfillment of desire devoutly to be wished.”

  But Nick couldn’t let it go. “But what if it wasn’t their desire to start out with? What if they were born into this world and given the parasite before they were old enough to decide? What if a convert changes their mind and wants to be free again?”

  “Then willingly we are releasing them and moving into stasis until we can find another host,” Burrows said. “But they are not wanting that. Once you are experiencing euphoria of the light inside, all else is emptiness.”

  A shiver rolled down my back. I had to shake out my shoulders to push back against the sudden influx of restless energy. That sounded a little too much like the all-consuming PCM fire for
comfort.

  “Gratitude for your time and food, Burrows,” I said, standing up. “We could’ve stayed longer if you had met us here last night when you said you would, but we’ve got to go. We’re losing daylight.”

  Burrows Short Day blinked in a way that conveyed superior smugness. “You would not be needing the light of the sun if you were choosing to take the light of the flet inside of yourself, Night Eyes.”

  I shot him a finger gun. “Say, that’s a good point. Let’s talk about it next time I give a fuck.”

  ***

  Nick glared out the windowscreen as he drove us away from the rhizome. He radiated pissed off the way a fire pit radiates heat. I watched, wondering what the best way would be to set him off—I was in the mood for some entertainment—but Carina got to him first.

  She glanced at him, then back out the window. “It’s fascinating. A whole society built and maintained by parasites.”

  “It’s sick and it’s wrong,” Nickie-boy said. “We should push into the Upper Swamps and force-vaccinate every one of them.”

  “It’s not a conversion if it’s forced,” she said. “It’s rape and murder.”

  “This would be killing, not murder.” That mountain-bayou accent was thickening with his frustration.

  “But it would still be like rape,” Carina said. “Some of them want to be hosts for the flet. We can’t take that away from them against their will.”

  “Just because they’ve never known anything else!” Nick slapped his huge hand on the steering wheel, sending a shockwave through the APC. “They were born into it. Do you think those babies had a chance to decide whether they wanted to host a parasite that would keep them locked in their own heads until they died?”

  “They might say the same about us. We were born into Christian families.”

  “We can choose to reject the faith. No one is controlling us. If the symbios even try—”

  “If they even try, specially trained aid workers like Misha and his team will spot the effort, stair-step their vaccinations, and help them transition to autonomy. It’s what God called them to do.”

  “Well, what if He’s calling all of the Guild to the symbio settlements?”

  “Then He didn’t let me know,” Carina said. “Did He call you to it? Nick Beausoleil, put down those pliers and let the mech armor and carriers and air support fall apart while you learn how to read a parasite’s host like a technical manual, then go set the flet captives free? He didn’t make you an aid worker, Nick, He made you a warrior and a mechanic. Without your gift, workers like Misha and Adelaide and Tommy couldn’t save anyone.”

  Nickie-boy ran his banana fingers through his hair. “Right now it seems like a pretty worthless gift.”

  “That’s because it is,” I said.

  “No, it’s because when something’s right in front of your face, it becomes real in a way that your brain can’t overlook.” Carina caught his hand before it could make another pass over his scalp and laced her fingers through his. “It’s good to feel that—it creates urgency—but you can’t let your emotions distract you from the job God gave you. If you don’t do your job, no one else can do theirs.”

  Nick shook his head, but the eggshell of tension around him had cracked. After a while, he said, “What about you?”

  “What about me?” Carina asked.

  I grinned. I also occasionally ask questions even though I already know what people are asking.

  “You’re good at reading people,” Nick said. “Do you ever feel like God wanted you to work with the aid groups instead?”

  A Carina-pause followed, so long that Nick mistook it for her not answering.

  “Did you?” he asked, a sharp edge to his voice. “Why aren’t you out there, then?”

  “Because.” Where Nickie-boy’s voice had been cutting, Carina’s was blunt force trauma. “It wasn’t God who wanted me to do it. It was me. He sent me over east instead, then He bounced me to the Enforcers, to training pages, to recon, to unspec—everywhere in Emden but the symbio settlements.” She turned in her seat and smiled at him. “It would definitely be fun to see what I can do against a parasite in a human body, and to prove to you once and for all that I can influence anybody given enough time with them. But that hasn’t been in His plan yet. If the time ever comes that it is, I’ll gladly rub your skeptical nose in it.”

  The remainder of Nickie-boy’s anger crumbled away then, and he smiled out the windowscreen.

  “You guys make me sick,” I said. “Seriously. I should’ve requested a breeding room for you two last night so you could hump these disgusting mudpuppy eyes off your ugly mugs.”

  TWELVE

  It’s easy to tell when you cross out of the Upper Swamps and into the Dead Estuaries. The water goes from red-black swamp ooze to a bright, opaque aquamarine that’s more like paint than water. Dull brown weeds grow out of it, but even when you get close, you can’t see them shooting down into it. Creel, cuttles, estuary eel, water snakes, lampreys, estuary striders, gatorachnids, and snapping turtles—any one of them could be swimming right next to your amphibious personnel carrier at any moment, and unless they broke the surface, you would never know. I assume the same goes for the trapped souls of the mages that have been drowned there, too, although that would be harder to prove.

  When we crossed over into the estuaries, the clouds had broken and the sun was putting on a show. Sharp shards of aquamarine light reflected and refracted around the inside of the APC.

  I held my hand in one of the rays, catching brilliant blue-green water in a dry palm.

  “It’s the same color as Envishtu’s Draught in Tsunami Tsity,” I told Nick. “Have you noticed that yet?”

  “I’ve never been up this far before,” he said, “But yeah, it is. Think that was intentional?”

  “The hell you say.” I played my fingers through the light, imagining I could feel its color. “Nothing was accidental in that game. Every element they used linked to something in the real world.”

  He gave a half-skeptical grunt. “Some stories are just stories.”

  “Not TT,” I said. “That was a revelation.”

  Magegrass sawed across the APC’s hull as we tooled along. According to the satellite photos, the vegetation would only get denser before we came to the edge of the sunken city. The windowscreen wasn’t going to be much use if we couldn’t see farther than the nose of our vehicle.

  Carina realized this as well. She took one hand off the wheel and flicked on the nav screen. A phosphor-green navigational map superimposed itself over the glass, further confusing the colors bouncing around inside the cab.

  At first I thought it was just a trick of the light that made it look like the screen was fuzzing out, but then Carina switched the screen off and back on again. The phosphors fuzzed and dissipated, made an attempt to fall back into line, then dissolved into static.

  She shut it off again and left it. The sunlight had disappeared. I sat up straighter and craned my neck to see out.

  “Anybody’s wristpiece acting up?” Nick asked, tapping the screen of his.

  “Hmm.” I tried to open my messages. My wristpiece went to silent footage of a feeding tube being shoved down an esophagus. Not something I had looked up in the entire time I’d owned a wristpiece. “Hmm hmm hmm.”

  Nick slipped his wristpiece off and dug a tiny screwdriver out of his pocket.

  Carina started to ask, “Would magic bleedover have this kind of effect on—”

  But a creeping, crawling female voice drowned her out. “When the man returned with help, he found a new carcass hanging dressed-out in his smokehouse, too wide of body and limb to be a deer. A new hide was curing on his stretchers. A hide with pale skin and long, black hair. And the rendering pot was boiling. Boiling a new skull.”

  The temperature inside the APC had dropped to just below freezing. Carina’s eyes roved around the interior and scanned the windowscreen. She looked like a tap on the shoulder might give her heart failure.<
br />
  “Ca—”

  “Don’t say my name,” Carina stopped me. “You’ll give it permission to talk directly to me. Cuttles can browse the static past, but they can’t say our names in the present unless we give them permission. Don’t use any names.”

  “Your mom?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “The Trapper’s Daughter. It was one of her favorite bedtime stories.”

  “No offense to S—to your mother,” Nick said, trying for sarcastic and failing, “But I don’t think she ever hit quite that tone of eerie while she was alive.”

  Carina gave him a strained smile. “Once or twice, maybe.”

  “The surgeon suggested a facial graft,” a froggy male voice said.

  “No, this is good,” Carina’s mother said. “It’ll remind her.”

  “This isn’t a story, S—! She’s going to have to grow up with that. What about when she starts school? When she wants to start dating? How do you think she’s going to feel about it then?”

  “Awful,” Sir Siobhan said. “It’s going to mark her. It’ll make her The Other in the most visible way possible. No one will be able to miss it. She’ll hate it, and she’ll hate that she cares enough to hate it. She’ll come home and cry alone in her room where we can’t see her.”

  “And you want that for her?!”

  “If you don’t, then you need to seriously reconsider what kind of child you’re trying to raise.”

  “Good try.” The right corner of Carina’s lips lifted in an insane grin. From my angle, I couldn’t see the left side of her face, but I knew the smile was butting up against the scar tissue there. “Come on, big boy, I’ve got plenty worse in here than that.”

  “And people think my old man was a psycho,” I said.

  “Shh,” Carina hissed. “Unless you want it to follow your voice and start spouting your secrets.”

  “So, what, we let you lure it out?” Nick said. “Screw that.” He pounded on the roof of the APC with one meaty fist and yelled, “You want to mess with somebody, stranger, why don’t you try me? You scared?”