by eden Hudson
When my wristpiece claimed that an hour had passed, I finally got up, took a hot shower in the absolute black of the bathroom, then dressed. The club downstairs was calling my name, promising somebody soft and unsuspecting to rock me to sleep.
***
I’d never been in the Sharp Right Turn’s club during daylight hours—usually when I stay in the City at the Pass, I prefer to do my hunting after dark and spend my mornings alone in the penthouse with some five-star breakfast—but driving all night had thrown off my internal schedule.
The sun was shining in through the open balcony, warming an elderly couple at one of the low tables near the railing and pissing off the assortment of dedicated drunks at the bar. Not much to pick from this early in the morning. There was exactly one vag in the whole place, and if she was a day under eighty, then I was an alligator snapping turtle.
I ordered a coffee—the Sharp Right Turn only serves the real stuff, straight from Old Castle, so I didn’t have to specify—then stalked off to a standing table in the corner. I could see the whole room from there, from the future casket-stuffers to the boozehounds to the motionless entrance.
This place was dead.
I sipped the ebony roast, rolling it around on my tongue to taste the notes of pit-burned mesquite that you can only get from Old Castle’s savory blend.
Might be fun to try to pick up the old bag just to see what her wrinkly walrus of a boyfriend would do. The drunks might even be good for some momentary entertainment—see what I could swipe from them and claim they’d dropped. There was also the bartender polishing highball glasses; I could kill some time hitting on him—make him as uncomfortable as possible, either because he wanted me and didn’t want to admit it to himself or because he wanted me and couldn’t have me—at least until something worth my time walked in.
While I waited, I took another drink of coffee and opened the SilverPlatter app to check Carina’s messages. Just a mass send from the Guild letting everyone know that new immunos would be required for Eastern Front actives. I sent it on through to Carina’s wristpiece. Wouldn’t want her getting behind on her shots.
With that done, I went into my countdown app. I thought I had checked it this morning before I left for the diner, but I remembered it saying that I had between seventy-two to a hundred and sixty-two days left. Now it was claiming I only had seventy-one to a hundred and sixty-one days left.
I shook the sudden tension out of my shoulders, then opened one of the ancient texts I’d been searching for clues to the Garden of Time.
But a wheezing cackle dragged my attention to the balcony. The fat old clam was jiggling like a garbage bag full of chowder, gasping and laughing as her walrus boyfriend tried to wipe splattered porridge off her saggy tits with his napkin.
“Stop it, Herschel!” she crowed, swatting at him.
The old walrus frowned, but his eyes were twinkling. “You got it all over you.”
“Oh, I did not!”
“Thirty-eight years together and you still can’t eat porridge without getting it everywhere. Messy little minx.”
She was laughing so hard now that her eyes were streaming beneath her thick glasses. She alternated smacking at the walrus’s hands and lifting her frames to press her napkin to her eyes.
Thirty-eight years. I considered winging my coffee cup at their heads and cracking one or both of their brittle old skulls. They were probably so osteoporosed that it wouldn’t even crunch.
I tried to go back to reading, but I couldn’t focus with those crusty old farts cackling at each other as if they weren’t both ten minutes from the crematorium. I closed out of the ancient texts.
From my angle, I could see their gnarled hands twisted together under the table. A scowl pulled down the corners of my mouth. I couldn’t stomach the rest of my coffee.
I got up and headed for the exit, tossing my cup at the trash on my way. It banged off the wall and into the can.
“Hey!” the bartender snapped. “That’s not disposable!”
I sent him an insultingly large funds transfer, then kept walking. “Let me know if that doesn’t cover it.”
TWO:
Nick
Nick Beausoleil stood exactly eight feet and six inches from the muddy river that ran past the Soami village of Courten, staring out at the scrap of blue tarp caught in a tangle of flood debris in one of the lower branches of a dead tree overhanging the water.
To his right stood the crazy-haired jungle witch, Re Suli, who was now in possession of a fragment of his soul. “You’re my bitch this week, Beausoleil,” Menendez used to say when Nick was scheduled to apprentice under her in the Guild mech shop, but on Menendez’s worst day, she’d never had him as tight by the balls as the tiny red-headed witch did. Re Suli had ordered Nick never to touch the river, and now eight feet six inches was as close as he could get.
The surface of the river broke at the very center, throwing water everywhere, and a grinning little boy gulped down fresh air.
“I got it!” Het hollered between gasps. “Miss Re, I got it!”
The little guy was dragging what looked like a muddy branch along with him as he paddled to shore. When Het made it to where he could stand up, he lifted the branch over his head as if it needed to be kept dry.
Nick watched the kid, but his mind was on the river.
Two days ago, he had been in Crystebon, filling out a report on the Forsaken vocor he’d helped their city Enforcers corner, putting into writing everything he’d been trying to keep Carina from finding out—how he’d thought she was dead, and so sold a piece of his soul to this vocor who promised to bring her back, how he’d been cheated, how he contracted Jubal Van Zandt to help him steal his soul fragment back—when a feeling like a river of pollution had flooded him, as if all hope and happiness were draining away, and his body was hemorrhaging something essential to who he was. Every thought washed away in the flood—everything but getting to Re Suli’s little shack. He’d tried to fight it, but that didn’t matter. His hands had closed out of the report and booked him a flight to Soam International with a Helicab connection to Courten.
When he had arrived, Re Suli had ordered him to disable his wristpiece, place it in a bag of stones, and toss it in the center of the river. She seemed to be under the impression that water would damage the wristpiece beyond repair. A ridiculous assumption, but Nick hadn’t been ordered to tell her if she was right to think so, only to do it, so he’d kept his mouth shut, disabled his wristpiece, dropped it into the bag of stones, and tossed it into the center of the river, directly in line with that flood debris. Right where Het had just come up from retrieving the witch’s sword. And if Nick had to guess, right where Re Suli had stored his soul jar.
The kid splashed onto the bank and trotted up to them, holding the muddy sword out to the witch.
“It was sure down there,” Het said. Sticky river mud still clung to his chubby little arms. “I had to dig all the ways up to my elbow!”
Re Suli took the sword from him.
“You done a right good job, Het.” She slipped it out of the rotting, mud-covered scabbard, pouring muddy water and a dead crawdad out as she did. The blade glinted in the sunlight. “I ’preciate it. Run along now.”
Het nodded once, serious as could be, then took off into the underbrush toward town.
Nick glanced at the blade—an old relic of a curved longsword, probably older than the Soam Crusades—then went back to staring at the river. He flexed his fist, feeling the barbwire tines puncture his wrist. Re Suli had made sure to order him never to touch his soul jar, so even if he did find it, he wouldn’t be able to take it back. But he hadn’t been ordered never to touch his wristpiece again. Just the river.
Based on the lazy current and the level of mud making up the riverbanks, he calculated that his wristpiece wouldn’t have moved far from where it had originally landed. The likelihood of snagging it with a branch or pole was low at best. There was the possibility that Carina would search h
is account history when she realized he was missing and follow the flights he’d booked to Courten, but there was no telling how long that might take. If the Soami airlines were as uncooperative with her as they’d been when he tried to investigate her disappearance, it could be weeks before she figured out where he was.
He didn’t want to wait weeks. He wanted to get out of here now and wrap his hands around the neck of that breaker trash who had sold him into this.
“This here,” Re Suli said, interrupting Nick’s bloody thoughts, “is the longsword of a real Soami hero.”
She raised the sword so that its curved blade caught the light again. The wrappings on the hilt were rotten and falling apart, making Nick think of the arm bones of a skeleton with the last shredded pieces of a burial shroud hanging off from it.
“My grandpappy carried this thang into every battle he fought,” she said. “Most of ’em against yer Guild folk. It was a-gettin’ mighty thirsty down there at the bottom of that river. Nicolai Éloy Beausoleil—”
That feeling of pollution poured into Nick, sweeping his mind clear of wristpieces and murder and backstabbing thieves. Using Nick’s full name triggered the soul jar’s compulsion. Nick couldn’t tell whether the thief had told her his full name or taking possession of his soul fragment had somehow given her the power of his name. All he knew was that it worked. Every time.
The little witch looked up at him from behind the blade. “—I want you to fix this sword so’s it’ll take down a leviathan. That oughta be a good start.”
THREE:
Jubal
I came awake suddenly, sure I had heard someone moving around my room. Careful not to alter my breathing patterns, I cracked my eyelids.
Complete darkness. I listened for the sounds of booming thunder and my father’s panicky respiration that meant another megacell had knocked out the power.
What I heard instead was the whoosh of air filtration and the soft whirring of a compressor. The electricity was still on.
Whoever I’d heard before moved again. A thud followed by a quiet grunt came from my right.
Then a begrudging, “Lights low.”
Carina. The knots in my shoulders and gut released, but I kept my eyelids cracked as the voice sensor in the penthouse brought up the lights around the perimeter of the room.
Through my eyelashes, I could see her. She slipped around the couch, paused to look my way, then apparently satisfied that I was still asleep, continued to the bathroom. The door closed.
I opened my eyes. Blinked, then rubbed them. It felt as if their lids were coated in sandpaper. I hadn’t slept for balls. Stupid old people with their wrinkly skin and lovey-dovey fishshit making everybody sick to their stomachs.
In the bathroom, the toilet flushed, and the shower came on.
I rolled onto my stomach and propped myself up on my elbows so I could see my wristpiece screen better.
According to the SilverPlatter app, Carina had received another message while I’d pitched and turned and tried to sleep. A response to her request for information from Hubert & Sons in Crystebon. Carina had posed as an internal investigator for Guild corruption, asking whether a knight matching the enclosed photo of one Nickie-boy the Dickie-boy had placed a bet with their firm on any recent dogfights. Ol’ Hubie had answered with admirable single-mindedness, stating only that a man who looked like the photo had ordered one elite package on the dogfights three days ago under the alias “Mr. Ronin.”
Because of Hubert & Sons’ policy of sending congratulatory gift baskets to their first-time big winner clients, Carina already knew that Nick had been there and what alias he’d used to place his bet. By asking, she was trying to establish a relationship and open the door to more in-depth questions about Nick’s foray into the world of high-stakes gambling. I sent the message through to keep her from becoming suspicious. If anything incriminating about a ruggedly handsome thief came up in the rest of their conversation, I would delete it.
By the time Carina came out of the bathroom fully dressed and with her hair wrapped up in a towel, I was reading through another promising hit my First Earth text crawler had returned on “Garden of Time” from the ancient library I had recently acquired.
I glanced from the towel wrapped around her head to the shirt and jeans she was wearing. “If you’re not going to come out naked and glistening, then don’t flaunt the fact that you just got out of the shower. It’s rude.”
She leaned over to unwrap the towel and rub at her wet hair.
“Next time give me enough notice to pack a bag,” she said. “I’ll come out in my pajamas.”
“No thanks. I’ve seen your pajamas, and I don’t want to ever see them again. They’re the exact opposite of arousing.”
“I don’t bring my good pjs on missions. Just a shirt of Nick’s and some old meditation pants.”
I pointed a finger gun at her. “Sister, we’ll turn around right now and go to your wet country house if you want to pack your sexy nighties. Or better yet, we’ll stop by the intimate clothier on Far Street here in town, and I’ll buy you all of them you can carry.”
Carina just snorted and shook her head.
“That’s not a no,” I said.
“Would you even notice if it was?”
“All I’m saying is that showcasing your assets might draw some of the attention away from that mess on your face.”
“You love this mess on my face. I’ve seen you staring at my scars, wishing you could touch them.”
My gut clenched into a fist, and my heart kicked at the wall of my chest as if it were trying to break out. Underneath the covers, I dug my fingers into the little roll of fat around my waist. My nails cut into the flesh.
“Huh?” I asked.
“I said I would rather be known for my scars than my assets.” Carina headed back to the bathroom to hang up the towel. “Nobody’s going to treat me different when the scars start to sag.”
The knot in my stomach came loose. I let go of my stomach skin and smiled. “That’s pretty selfish, Bloodslinger. You’re not the one who has to hold down his breakfast while that nightmare is staring him in the face.”
“And yet somehow you manage,” she said.
I bounced out of bed as if I didn’t give a fuck what she thought about my weight and grabbed my pants and tourist shirt off the chair I’d laid them over.
“I fight through the nausea,” I said. “Nobody wants to look like they just crawled out of a Soami prison pit. Which reminds me—order us up something to eat while I’m in the shower. Better make yours a double, Skeleton Anji.”
***
After we ate the meat plates with extra meat that Carina ordered up, we hopped in the Culebra and headed north again. Carina wasn’t very talkative. She spent most of the afternoon messing around on her wristpiece.
“What’s so interesting on there that you can’t entertain me?” I asked.
“Technomancy,” she said.
I waited for further explanation and got nothing.
“Because you think the Guild will need you to interrogate the technomancers they bring in,” I prompted.
A slightly distracted Carina-nod. “I need to be prepared. If there’s something I can use…”
“Then you’ll want to use it carefully,” I said. “Technomancers are nobody to jack around with. They can destroy your identity and take everything you own. What you ought to do is train a bunch of Guild peons to do the actual interrogations for you. Put the target on their backs, not yours.”
“This isn’t something for new knights to cut their teeth on,” she said. “Once I’ve got enough relevant information, I’m going to send a report to the experienced interrogators covering the main points and meet with them a few times before the subjects start coming in for questioning.”
I shrugged. “It’s your identity. At least until one of these subjects gets ahold of it.”
Carina didn’t respond to that, just kept reading.
I stared out the wi
ndscreen at the highway and considered the timeline on this new inquisition. It couldn’t have been very long after we got back from the sunken city that the proposal was put forth in the Guild to round up known technomancers. Based on the reports Carina and her investigation team had brought back from the Upper Swamps, it was possible that this push to interrogate technomancers was directly related to finding out more information on the Tects.
But there was one member of the Guild’s High Council who’d been dogging my steps a little too close lately—Fishdick Cuthy, Head Scribe. The proposal for this inquisition just so happened to pop up right after Ol’ Fishdick hired my archeo-technomancer to build him a crawler identical to mine to read the jumbled remains of unsalvageable texts I’d sent him.
There wasn’t much chance that could be a coincidence. I couldn’t see how it was connected yet, but it was connected. Everything is. It’s all part of the same knot.
***
PCM fire poured into my mouth like lava, burning my sinuses and flowing down my throat, igniting my stomach in flames of ruby, citrine, topaz, and diamond. So spicy and still so sweet, like drinking plasma straight from the surface of the sun. It hurt. It satisfied. It obliterated and it completed.
It disappeared.
My lungs lurched, but not with a gasp the way they usually did when I came back to myself from a PCM fit and needed to catch up on the oxygen deficit the attack had caused. This time the lurch was a sob. My eyelashes were wet and my throat ached almost as badly as the hollow space between my sternum and the pit of my stomach.
“Van Zandt?”
The world jerked. I opened my eyes. Blinding sunlight glinted off the dragonfly iridescent front end of a long, low, classic Culebra. One mahogany hand clutched the real-wood-lined steering wheel in front of me. Claw-like fingers dug into the meat of my shoulder and shook me.
“Van Zandt!”
“Ouch, stop it!” I jerked my shoulder free.