by eden Hudson
On the ground, that clop-clop-clopping was even louder. I could feel it resonating in my skull.
I melted backward into the shadows. Hiding is technically something you should never do, but like I said, tailing is more about trusting your gut than sticking to a set of rules. Besides, I’m better than rules.
A second later, Marinette galloped past. Her man-pony pulled up under the ripped awning of a boarded-up old storefront whose bricks were decaying under the constant onslaught of acid rain, salt air, and good old-fashioned pollution.
It’s never a mansion or a luxury hotel with craft workers. It’s always got to be somewhere nasty, run-down, or both.
Rather than get down and walk, the Bwa Chech waited on Man-Pony’s back while Umbrella Guy scraped the door open for her. With a flick of Marinette’s heels, Man-Pony lurched back into motion, carrying his bony mistress inside. Umbrella Guy followed.
The door closed behind them.
I waited, watching the cracks of the board-covered windows, but no lights came on.
“Hmm,” I breathed, shifting from one foot to the other. “Hmm hmm hmm.”
I followed the shadows down the length of the building. When I got to the end of the block, I stepped out of the shadows and strolled across the street as though I belonged there, putting a little hitch in my step as though I might be a hwaryna heading home after a long night hustling at the fights.
A single unbroken streetlamp flickered at the far end of the cross street, lighting up the yawning mouth of an alley that ran behind the old storefronts. I backtracked down the alley until I found the boarded-up dump Marinette had gone into.
From behind, I could see that the storefront’s second story had crumbled in on itself, leaving only the façade and lower story of the building intact. I couldn’t tell what condition the first floor was in because there were exactly zero windows and doors back there. Obviously the place had been built before Crystebon started enforcing fire codes.
Clicking on my wristpiece light, I checked the ground for a metal trapdoor. Nothing behind Marinette’s building. I headed down the alley a little, checking behind each of the buildings as I went. Sometimes these old store blocks had one central door for deliveries and a shared series of tunnels running under the alley to each building.
I found the sheet of rusty diamond plate set into the asphalt three buildings down. It was latched shut with a corroded padlock. Decades of polluted sea air, fat feet, and cargo carrier tires had bowed the door in enough that rainwater pooled in the middle.
I shut off my wristpiece light in case anybody from Marinette’s transportation team or her gang was in the basement. I could hear water trickling through the cracks around the door. If water could make it through, light could, too.
Working from the picture I’d saved in my head, I found the padlock. It was an old MadDog, fully manual. They’d been popular for a while fifty or sixty years back when people first started to realize that electronic locks could be picked by anybody who downloaded an e-skeleton key app to their wristpiece. Nowadays, with the infinitely more complicated lock algorithms, laws forbidding the production and ownership of skeleton keys, and higher learning curves for the use of illegal electronic lock picking tech, people have mostly conceded that electronic locks are superior. Plus, you don’t have to carry around those cumbersome analog keys. In another hundred years, manual locks will probably be back in. Because I’m the greatest thief in history and as timeless as I am beautiful, I know how to open them all.
I pulled out the little wallet of analog tools I always keep on me, selected a happy-looking C rake and the appropriate sized wrench, started the timer on my wristpiece, then went to work.
Forty-three seconds later, the padlock popped open. I shut the timer off and glared down at the lock. My personal best on a wet, rusty MadDog I’d never met before while working blind in the dark was sixteen seconds. Even factoring in any lost dexterity from the cold, I should’ve been able to rake it in under thirty.
I tested my fingers by walking the rake and wrench across the back of my knuckles, one at a time, then simultaneously. But when I tried to do one followed a step later by the other, I bumped the rake against the wrench and had to grab them with my free hand to keep from dropping them.
I shoved both tools back into the little leather wallet and slipped that into my pocket. The cold was bothering me more than I realized. That was all. It wasn’t the PCM calcifying my joints. I still had plenty of time before the plague started getting in the way.
Because the trapdoor was bowed in, I had to pry the door up to take the tension off the padlock’s shackle so I could slip it out of the latch. Little notches where the latch had bitten into the metal over the years scraped the printless pads of my fingers as I laid the lock aside.
I pulled the trapdoor open, trying to keep the weight off the hinges so they wouldn’t scream. They gave a slight creak as I eased the door to the ground, but not enough to alert anybody three buildings over.
The basement below me was darker than dark. It was a void falling off into greater nothingness. A black hole.
I stuck my head down inside. It felt like being swallowed. The darkness seemed to muffle the sound from the street. Even the trickle of runoff into the basement sounded different with my face dunked in the nothingness. If Marinette was standing with her nose an inch from my ventilator, there was no way I would’ve known.
I pulled back up, the hiss of acid rain filling my ears once again. I angled my face toward the building Marinette was in, then leaned down again. I clicked my wristpiece light on then off.
The split second of illumination showed me a tunnel wide enough for two men to walk past one another pushing dollies or carrying crates. An assortment of rotted pallets, fallen-in rafters, and other debris littered the ground.
I grabbed the edge of the trapdoor and lowered myself down, sneaks first. I’d made it through harder mazes with less of a layout to go on.
TWENTY-ONE:
Carina
One week later, the notification came that a raiding party was preparing to ride out.
Miyo was praying for a new bride’s fertility when the notification popped up. She finished the prayer, then excused herself, and in private, doused her hands with the axolotl venom. Just like Yisu had warned her, she was careful not to touch herself or any food as she left the temple and found where the men were forming up.
Yisu was already at the apothecary’s table. She handed Miyo the Blood of Envishtu with only the slightest widening of her aquamarine eyes to convey the mutual excitement.
One by one, Miyo anointed the men with the quatrefoil-laced Blood.
She didn’t hesitate as she applied the Blood to her father’s face. Carina observed Miyo’s emotions, clinically detached although she was controlling the girl’s actions. Miyo realized this was a moment of betrayal, but there was no pang of guilt or second-guessing. She’d spent too much of her life misleading the people she loved most for this new level of performance to trouble her. Miyo was so consumed with the idea that she and Yisu were doing something that would forever change the world for the better that she would’ve justified anything to accomplish it.
They did everything right. They followed the plan. After the invocation, the men should have ridden away from Tsunami Tsity, only to return covered in painful boils and seeking the expertise of their god’s high priestess.
But halfway through the invocation, Unan began to gasp and choke as if he were drowning. He clutched his throat and stumbled off of his waterbike. His face was darkening, turning purple.
“Father?” Miyo whispered.
Men lurched away from Unan’s flailing arm, shocked. A woman screamed.
Miyo froze. She couldn’t understand what was happening.
“Unan!” Qiva shouted, sliding down the nearest pole to her husband. Red-black swamp water flew up around her as she splashed to her husband.
Unan thrashed and struggled to get to his wife. His face was dist
orting, lips inflating, eyes swelling shut, skin turning black. He clawed at his throat, beat a fist on his chest. He seemed to be trying to choke out a word, but his lips and tongue had swollen too large to speak.
Miyo couldn’t move. Nothing Carina did would force her into action.
By then, Qiva had reached Unan. She grabbed him as he collapsed.
“Unan!” she shouted. “Envishtu save him! Miyo, save him!”
Miyo took one step forward, reaching a shaking, Blood of Envishtu-stained hand toward her father.
“Heal him, Miyo!” Qiva begged. “Pray to Envishtu to—”
“Turn him over!” The old apothecary sloshed past, shouldering Miyo aside, holding a vial up out of the water. “Now!”
Qiva rolled Unan onto his back. The apothecary knocked Unan’s thick hands away and dripped purple liquid from the vial onto the scratches he’d made clawing at his throat. Then she peeled back his eyelids one at a time and poured some into his eyes.
Miyo found Yisu in the crowd. She looked alarmed, terrified, but not confused.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered, backing away. She looked into Miyo’s eyes, pleading for forgiveness. “I didn’t know.”
Slowly, slowly, the swelling began to go down. Unan took one whistling breath, then another.
The whole tribe seemed to breathe with him, relieved.
The apothecary straightened up, her weathered face searching for something or someone, but before she could speak, a cry went up from among the men.
“Ah! What is it? What is it?!”
“A plague! The wrath of Envishtu! Unan was only the first!”
Wide, pink, fluid-filled blisters had broken out everywhere the Blood of Envishtu had touched the men’s flesh. As they felt the blisters growing and saw them on each other, chaos broke out. Waterbikes turned over. A baby wailed. Men and women shouted that Envishtu’s wrath was being poured out upon them.
It seemed impossible that the elderly apothecary could raise her voice loud enough to yell over the uproar, but in the end, she got their attention.
“It’s not the wrath of Envishtu, you idiots!” the apothecary shouted. She grabbed a nearby raider and pointed to the blisters growing on his face. “These are blisters contracted from the oil in quatrefoil leaves.”
“Quatrefoil?” Qiva whispered. “That doesn’t even grow in the swamp.”
“No, it doesn’t.” The apothecary nodded, her mouth pulled into a grim frown. “If it did, we would long ago have realized that Unan was deadly allergic to it and kept more than this little dribble of neutralizer around to treat him and any others like him.”
“Then it is the wrath of Envishtu?” asked a heavily blistered man.
“It is not,” the apothecary said. “I keep a small jar of quatrefoil extract on hand for experiments. Today, I found it missing.”
A murmur ran through the tribe.
“Someone tried to poison Unan?” Qiva asked. “Why?”
“It is Envishtu’s judgment!” a raider yelled. “We are all affected because our mighty god spares none when he pours out his wrath!”
“Use your eyes, you dimwits,” the apothecary snapped. “We are not all affected, only those in the raiding party. Neither was Unan the only target. No one could have known he would have such a reaction to quatrefoil. No, the Blood of Envishtu was contaminated.”
Miyo met Yisu’s wide aquamarine eyes. Yisu made a swift washing motion with her hands, then dropped them to her sides again.
Uh-oh, Miyo! Somebody’s got blood on their hands!
Objective: Wash the evidence and axolotl venom away!
Miyo dipped her hands into the swamp water and scrubbed.
The tribe muttered amongst themselves, trying to understand.
Qiva, now holding her breathing but unconscious husband, spoke up. “Are you saying that someone put quatrefoil in the Blood of Envishtu mistakenly?”
“It was no mistake,” the apothecary said. Her shoulders and face sagged as she turned to Yisu. “Why would you do this, child? Best of my students, Envishtu-blessed mind, why would you betray your calling? Why would you betray our god?”
Yisu whispered something, her eyes cast down at the red-black water.
“Speak!” demanded Qiva.
“Envishtu has blessed me all I can stand,” Yisu said louder, raising her head to meet the bewildered and angry gazes of her fellow Tsunami Tsity citizens. “I won’t make potions to serve his cruel whims anymore.”
“Blasphemy!”
“She brought the curse on us!”
“Traitor to Envishtu!”
“Heretic!”
“Murderess!”
“Burn her before his wrath comes on us all!”
“The priestess!” a man shouted. Under his blisters, Carina recognized him as Pozu, the young raider who had accused Miyo of anointing them wrong before their last raid. “Why didn’t she tell us that the apothecary’s apprentice was a traitor?”
“The priestess couldn’t have known,” the apothecary said. “Quatrefoil extract is colorless, scentless. There was no way to tell until the blistering started.”
“But she read Envishtu’s will in the traitor’s burns last week! Why didn’t she condemn the traitor then… Unless they’re in this together?”
“Are you saying she did this to her own father?” Yisu snapped coldly, as if disgusted by the idiocy that would cause such a suggestion. She looked down her nose at the tribe. “It was only me. I won’t share the credit for an action that only I had Envishtu-blessed brains to carry out.”
Miyo opened her mouth and raised her hands to address the crowd, unwilling to let Yisu kill herself alone. But before she could speak—
“The priestess is unblistered!” a nearby woman shouted in a shrill voice, pointing bladed fingers at Miyo’s hands. “She had the contaminated Blood all over her hands, but she is clean!”
A blister-riddled raider took up the cry. “The poison the apprentice gave us didn’t affect her!”
“Envishtu declares his priestess’s innocence!” another shouted. “He makes her clean!”
Your Appearance and Conduct have deflected Pozu’s accusations once again!
Bonus: +15 Charisma for 24 in-game hours! All residents of Tsunami Tsity, from Enemy to Adoring Friend, worship you!
The frightened and afflicted tribe members closed in on her then, begging Miyo, “Heal us of the curse! Deliver us from this evil, redeem us with your twice-blessed hands!”
***
When Miyo finally broke away from their clinging, pleading clutches, the pyre had already been built and set ablaze on a stretch of swampy ground outside the village. Miyo ran to it, pumping her legs and kicking up water everywhere.
Blister-covered raiders led Yisu to the flames without restraints or force. A glance at her once-aquamarine eyes showed all pupil, no color.
An empty bottle of Envishtu’s Draught lay nearby.
Miyo stumbled onto the muddy land. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
They shoved Yisu onto the roaring pyre. Yisu blinked once at her only ally, her only friend, then she knelt down in the flames to die.
“No,” Miyo begged, too far away for Yisu to hear.
As the flames grew and the smoke blackened, the tribe cried out to Envishtu, cutting their arms and stomachs and chests with their finger blades, begging him to remove the cursed one before her evil spread. They continued to wail and scream and call on their distant god as the fire consumed Yisu’s body.
Miyo tried to reach into the blaze and pull Yisu out, but because of her high Appearance, Conduct, and Charisma scores, the other men and women thought she was caught in a passion for the mighty god she served. They dragged her back from the fire, begging her not to harm herself, claiming that the death of the traitor would be enough to appease Envishtu.
As the night wore on, the fire burned down, and the supplicators wore themselves out. They collapsed, exhausted, in the mud. Eventually, they r
ose again and returned to their treetop homes, satisfied that Envishtu had heard their prayers and accepted their blood and the body of the cursed one.
Qiva was the last to leave, pressing a kiss to her daughter’s hair before turning to go.
As the sun rose, Miyo sat beside the ashes alone, numb, shivering. Their plan should have worked. They’d done everything right.
TWENTY-TWO:
Jubal
I kept my left hand on the tunnel wall as I picked my way through the blackness. My eyes felt like they were open twice as wide as usual, but they might as well have been shut. All I could see were the same oil-spill impressions of color that you see against the backs of your eyelids.
According to the view I’d gotten when I flashed my wristpiece light, the tunnel was a straight shot from the trapdoor to the abandoned storefront Marinette and her man-pony were holed up in. My ears strained for any hint of humanoid habitation, but all I could hear was trickling runoff pouring in from aboveground and the squish of my sneaks in the thick carpet of sludge.
From what I could smell, my ventilator was the only thing standing between me and lung-herpes. If the tunnel floor hadn’t been studded with broken, mildewy boards and the thin metal strips that once held pallets of boxes together but now functioned solely as foot-amputating lockjaw transmitters, I would’ve made better time. But I was already going to have to burn these sneakers and all the clothes I was wearing, not to mention sanitize my left hand with a flamethrower. I wasn’t going to rush a thirty-yard walk just so I could end up impaled esophagus to anus on some jagged two-by-four soaked in flesh-eating superbacteria.
Finally, the layout of the alley I had in my head showed that I was passing under the storefront building. I took a right into its basement. Still not even a hint of light.
There should’ve been a staircase or a lift of some sort down there somewhere, but I could’ve spent an hour making my way around the perimeter of the basement searching it out in the dark. The most expedient option was to do another on/off click of my wristpiece light.