by eden Hudson
“Why?”
I started to open my mouth, then pretended to think better of it. “Never mind, nothing.”
“What?” Her playful outrage was like sparkly pink icing on a glowing cupcake. “You can’t just lead with something like that and then say it’s nothing!”
I shook my head. “We are in the middle of nowhere, and you are working.”
“Humor me,” she said. “Tell me what it would’ve been if we weren’t.”
I let the silence draw out as if I were considering whether or not to tell her. That’s when PCM fire burned through my veins.
***
Cold chased down the paths the flames had deserted. My chest, throat, and the space behind my eyes ached with emptiness as the final aftertaste of fire drained away, leaving me starving for more.
I came back with my heart pounding, trying to make up for the beats it had missed while I was out, but I managed not to gasp. I took a slow breath through my nose, inhaling engine fumes and the rancid smell of old swamp mud laced with a very, very light touch of honey.
The candy knight’s honey perfume. Her hand was on my elbow, and she had leaned closer, a wicked smile on her lips.
“Please,” she said. “I can’t live with the suspense. You have to tell me.”
Iceni’s braids were pulled back in a tight knot today, but I brushed my fingers around the shell of her ear anyway, then leaned in until my lips were almost touching her skin. In a low murmur, I told her everything I’d like to do to her if we were back in civilization.
Her breath caught a few times, and I could see the pulse point in her delicate neck throbbing, but the PCM fit had taken all the fun out of the game. It’d broken up the timing and reminded me that even if I bagged the candy knight right in front of Carina’s face, fucking her wasn’t going to feel as good as what I’d just felt. As complete. Nothing could compare with that.
But I kept whispering, kept seducing, kept that secretive smile on my face. Kept pretending that there wasn’t a part of me that wanted the plague to hold me in that fire forever.
EIGHT
The farther into the active zone we went, the more alert the knights around me became. They stopped taking turns keeping watch and all stood up, holding onto those ceiling handles—Carina and Iceni on either side, Nick looking out the back doors. I didn’t want to miss out on anything this close to skinner territory, so I stayed standing, too.
Outside, the sky had turned a color a few shades darker than wood smoke. Wide-trunked cypresses and ancient swamp hedges stretched up into the gray morning sky.
As we drove, the land became less bumpy and more soggy. To start with, black-red swamp water oozed out of the ground around the APC’s wheels. The farther we went, the higher that red-black ooze rose, until we were floating and the stick bug in the driver’s seat had to switch to the amphibious engines. Every now and then, I could feel the wheels roll over higher spits of land, but we were in the Upper Swamps now.
Eventually, Jha turned around and said, “Skinner territory. Twenty minutes to the village.”
Here felled trees with obvious saw marks made plenty of room for the APC—or something of comparable width—to motor through the swamp without obstruction. The trees still standing were decorated with scorch marks and slashes. Little stringy clumps of muscle and bone that used to have weasel, rat, or coon pelts wrapped around them scampered through the branches.
“The APC is lead-lined, with two poly-plate hulls,” Iceni said in that saccharine, reassuring voice. “Even if they were to attack us while we’re driving, they’ll never get inside.”
I giggled at a bloody lump up in a tree that wouldn’t stop screaming at us. Looked like it used to be a squirrel. “Guess again, candy stripe. You Guild knights might mess your pants whenever you come into skinner territory, but they give me the warm fuzzies inside. They were the inspiration for the Fleshers in the best VR game of all time, Tsunami Tsity. For me, this is like walking into my favorite holostar’s house and touching all of their stuff.”
Nickie-boy made a low sound in his throat. “That was a great game.”
“The greatest of all time,” I corrected him. “Even the fancy sensographics these days can’t compare. The story was too good. I logged about seven thousand hours in TT.”
“When Yisu shows up,” Nick said reverently.
My eyes prickled at the memory, and I had to blink a few times. “Fuck, that was gorgeous.”
“I never replayed the story mode once I finished it,” he said, still staring out at the swampscape. “Always wanted to, but I didn’t want to lose that perfect first-time feeling.”
“Same,” I said. Then I wondered whether I would have given in to the temptation eventually if my father hadn’t taken away my VR console when I stopped being a cute little fat kid and started turning into a disgusting slob.
“Nostalgia’s clouding your memory,” Iceni said. “Psych Tryke’s been putting out better and better games ever since they absorbed CandyCorn. The Broken Line series? Vellum? Don’t even get me started on Hell Gate: The Harrowing. You just think Tsunami Tsity was the best because you were kids. If you played it today, you would realize how far games have come since.”
“If I wasn’t so sure that you could kick my ass, I would backhand you right now,” I told her.
“She wasn’t old enough to buy it when it came out,” Nick said. “That’s why she’s blaspheming.”
“Har, har,” Iceni said. “My parents bought it for me, smart guy. I’m not saying TT wasn’t a great contribution to the canon or that it wasn’t years ahead of its time. But nowadays they’re putting out games that go even beyond what it achieved. If you played a few of those—”
“I’ve played them,” Nick said.
“Objectively,” Iceni qualified.
“I haven’t,” I said. “Fuck your objectivity. What do you think, Carina?”
“Don’t bother asking,” Nick said. “She doesn’t like VR.”
“Are you serious?” My head snapped around in the opposite direction so I could see Carina.
She didn’t look away from her window, and her watchful expression didn’t change. “My parents didn’t think they were good for kids.”
“Now that’s crazy,” Iceni said.
“What the balls?!” I demanded. “You’re a grown-ass woman, Carina. You can play whatever you want to.”
The corner of her lips twitched against the scar tissue on her left cheek.
“When we get back to dry land, we’re popping your VR cherry,” I said. “Nickie-boy, do you still have one of the old consoles?”
“I can rig up the G9s to play TT. The sensuals won’t work, but that won’t matter.”
“Not with a game like Tsunami Tsity it won’t,” I said. “Jeez, Carina, if I had known, I wouldn’t have dropped you out of that helicopter. You could’ve died.”
“I’m not playing a VR game with you or anyone else,” Carina said.
“You don’t play Tsunami Tsity with,” I said. “You experience it. Alone. It’s a solo endeavor. It’s meant to be that way. That’s why when— Ah, shit, I’m getting choked up again just thinking about it!”
Carina glanced away from her window at Nick. He seemed to feel her eyes touch him even though he was still keeping watch out his window.
He nodded as if in answer to her unasked question. “It’s that good.”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
I grinned.
God, she was going to lose her mind when she played through! Tsunami Tsity was practically written for people like me and her. Loners walking the earth every day among the enemy, capable of knowing everyone else but unknowable by anyone, giving up completely just in time to meet the one being in existence who could see into us and appreciate us. She was going to love it.
***
Almost twenty minutes to the second later, Sir Jha called back, “Skinner village ahead. It’s the investigation site.”
“Bring us in as c
lose as you can, Kuchera,” Carina said, leaning into the front for a second. “Then park us with our nose pointed home. I want you right here in case we have to make a quick exit.” She returned to the back of the APC and raised her voice a little bit so everyone could hear her over the engine. “We’re here for information, but I don’t want it at the cost of anybody’s life. Let’s do our jobs right for the sake of the people who were killed here, but let’s also stay alert for the sake of the people waiting on us back home.”
A nod and general murmur of assent passed through the vehicle. Kuchera motored the APC around and parked it.
The knights piled out first, Guild-issued rifles at the ready. In a surprise move, the elderly Sir Jha took the point. He waded through the swamp water slowly, inspecting the burnt-out husks of houses built into the trees over our heads. Every now and then he took one hand off of his rifle and touched a tree or rested his palm on the top of the red-black water.
No one said anything, just spread out in formation around the APC, watching the old man. I waited inside with the Kuchera stick bug, and dug through my bag for my shoulder waders. That water was waist-high on Nickie-boy. I had a limited number of khakis and tourist shirts for this trip and nowhere to launder them until we got back to dry land.
After a few minutes of wading around, Jha turned back. “No obvious signs of life.”
The knights spread through the village, investigating burn marks on the trees and sorting through debris that had tangled in the roots. Iceni let her rifle hang from its sling and, wedging herself between two trees, spider-climbed up until she could pull herself onto one of the burned-out houses’ porches.
Unlike other pagan swamp villages, none of the treetop houses here were connected to any other by bridges or ropes. Skinners use bamboo poles set into the swamp mud at strategic intervals to move from one house to the next when they need to. It doesn’t stop the creatures the kids practice on from running away, but it does stop the full-grown skinners’ human subjects from getting very far before their hides have been removed.
Once I got my waders on, I sloshed out into the swamp to look for anything valuable and take pictures of the carnage. There’s always a market in Emden for rare pagan artifacts, especially if they have a tragic backstory.
Carina was at the far end of the village, where someone had cut down some trees and constructed a huge burn platform. The platform was piled high with blackened, crispy bodies. A few of them had rolled into the water, either trying to escape the fire or as the pile shifted and settled. Carina turned over a half-burned corpse to find that the fish, bugs, and craw daddies had eaten away most of the submerged soft tissue.
I started in that direction. Amid the squish and suck of the mud around my waders’ feet, I occasionally felt things snap under my weight like bones.
When I got to Carina, she was sifting through the burn pile with her knife, checking hands.
“Find anything interesting?” I asked.
“So far, none of the aid team,” she said, running her knife down the razor blades set into the finger bones of one charred skeleton’s left hand. “These bodies all have skinner fingers.”
“Over here,” Nick hollered from the other side of the village.
Iceni gave Carina and me a brief glance down as we waded past her perch. The look was of momentary surprise, as if our presence had jolted her out of another world, but she went back to inspecting the scene and taking pictures without comment.
Jha was waiting with Nick, both of them at the foot of what I first thought was just another clump of trees. Until I looked up and saw that all the branches had been cut off, and about twenty feet up each trunk a body had been hung, its forearms stretched out and riveted to a shiny steel crossbeam that had been driven into each trunk. Six corpses in all, bloated and picked over. Nick’s shout had scared a pair of chicken hawks back into the air, but a skinned ball of muscle and fat hunched on one body’s shoulder, gnawing away at one sagging breast.
These bodies hadn’t been burned. Blood had seeped from beneath the rivets in their arms and run down the steel beam, drying like rivers of rust. More blood had pooled in their legs and feet after death, turning them a livid black. Rotting heads sagged forward or lolled off to the sides, probably in the same position they’d fallen into a few hours after they stopped being able to pull themselves up to release the pressure on their lungs enough to take a breath. The stink of decay was overwhelming in spite of the fact that we were upwind and twenty feet below the bodies.
Carina looked at Jha.
“See the writing over their heads,” the old knight said. “They were attacked by Tects.”
We all squinted at the stabs and slashes in the tree trunks, but it wasn’t any language I’d ever encountered, and the characters didn’t seem to have any similarities to the other pagan writing systems I knew.
“I’m not familiar with Tects,” Carina said.
She looked at me and I shrugged. One of the things that makes me the best thief in the history of the Revived Earth is knowledge of cultures and artifacts—both ancient and current—that less informed thieves have never heard of, but I’d never heard of Tects, either.
Jha sighed. “The theory is that this new god created them. No one even knew they existed until last year. Recon ran into a few of them way out—more than a hundred eighty miles east of the Lava Fields, if I remember right.”
“Looks like they’re pushing inland,” Nick said.
“Astute observation, Nicholas.” I pointed at the rotting corpses. “Additionally, these guys are dead. I don’t want to make any wild leaps, but I’m starting to doubt that they’re fresh kills.”
Carina didn’t seem to be paying attention to either of us. She nodded at the writing over the corpses’ heads. “Do we have any translation engines for their language yet?”
“We don’t need one,” Jha said. “The few confirmed samples of Tect writing that have been found so far are in machine code.” He took a picture with his wristpiece, then read, “This one says, ‘Feed the beast or be fed to it.’”
“They’re leaving messages that anybody with a wristpiece could translate,” Carina said.
“Everybody in the world but that witch in Courten,” I said. Then I remembered Nytundi’s pathetic lack of modern technology. “And shitty island nations nobody cares about. If you were a new god trying to gain mass popularity, you’d want the capability for widespread communication, too.”
A winter breeze rattled the dry leaves that still clung to the trees, and the skinned ball of muscle that had been nibbling on one of the corpses took a running jump from the arm of its crucifix and landed on the next closest.
“What else should I be noting?” Carina asked. “Positioning? Method? What am I looking for that’s characteristic of a Tect attack?”
“The saw marks on the trees,” Nick said, letting his rifle hang so he could mess with his wristpiece. “I’ve got recon footage from their first sighting. Let me pull it up.”
A few seconds later, we were watching a shaky holo of what looked like a human body with eight metal limbs. Its bottommost limbs carried its meat through the thick summer foliage of the eastern mangroves while its human legs dangled limply. Its human toes drifted across the surface of the red-black water. As we watched, the Tect grabbed a tree with its topmost pair of arms, then sawed through the trunk with one of its middle arms, which was actually a chain-driven saw sword. As the knight recording withdrew, the Tect grabbed a tree opposite the one it had already cut and cleared it, too.
“Cyborgcromantic?” Carina asked.
“Looks like it,” Nick said.
“There hasn’t been enough contact yet to know whether cyborgcromancy is typical or atypical,” Jha said. “But the few confirmed sightings and engagements have been with individuals similarly outfitted.”
“Clearing the way,” Carina said. “How many cleared patches did we cross on the way in? Two? Three?”
“APC should’ve been recording
,” Nick said. “We’ll check the footage.”
“Add it to your report.” Carina looked at Jha. “Notify the base that they need to alert any aid teams and patrols in the area, and suggest they offer open sanctuary to the pagans. Let’s wrap up here and get back.”
“I’ll get the aid team down,” Nick said.
“Gross!”
Nick frowned at me.
“You’ll never get the smell out of your skin if you touch them,” I said.
But Carina was looking at Nick as if he’d just reminded her that she left the fire pit on.
“We have to for identification and to confirm cause of death,” she said, nodding. “No one’s dead until we’ve got a body.”
“And their families deserve a real goodbye,” Nick said. “They died for God. They don’t deserve to hang up there forever. I’ll get them on the APC, then Kuchera and I can start building a grave-box for what’s left of the skinners.”
A memory of the brujah carcasses Carina and I had left to rot on the steamy Soam jungle floor flashed through my mind.
Maybe Carina was remembering the same thing. When I looked at her, her eyes had turned the dark green of emeralds wrapped in velvet, and they were tracing Nickie-boy’s face like soft fingertips.
That cold, black sickness came back and coiled in my stomach and chest. I wandered off to find something worth stealing.
***
The skinners hadn’t kept much of interest in their houses. Their wardrobes—which had been their titular pastime and their main status symbol—had almost all burned with them. I found one humanskin slipper and a pair of pants stitched together out of collected tattoos, but the rest was gone. I made a quick trip back to the APC to stash the tattoo pants in my bag before one of the knights could see and object, but left the slipper to allay any suspicion of evidence theft. I also made sure to take pictures of the devastation that had befallen the pants’ maker—unique items sell better when backed by a tragic true story for why it’s the only piece of its kind.
There was also no sign of the skinless slaves the skinners kept. Either they’d been killed and burned along with their owners—which Jha and Iceni both thought unlikely because of the number of bodies in the burn pile compared to the living space in the village—or they’d been absorbed into the Tects, a theory Carina put forth.