“You’re doing fine,” I tell her flatly. But she has succeeded in getting me onto the grid, I guess. I sink back into the gloom and see/feel for the path ahead.
Besides the newbie driver, there’s the utter catastrophe of the baby dragon itself.
Like, the safe is a trivial puzzle to this creature. The first day, she escapes three times, and she’s a lethal little death lizard! She hisses flame, inside the phib. She eats my food – okay, it’s only a teaspoon or so, because she’s 15 centimeters high, but I’m sure the food is now contaminated.
Thea does nothing.
No, Thea sketches the monster. She laughs when it poses before we lure it back to the safe and lock it in.
Oh, it’s fine in there. There’s enough air in between breakouts.
It, she.
Besides, if it suffocates, mission accomplished, so far as I’m concerned.
It’s night and the boks are resting. “I wonder if dragons name their offspring,” Thea says as we get ready to sleep.
“If dragons – what?” Dragons are not sentient creatures. Thea must know this. She’s a guild elder, for god’s sake. Guild and dragon – mortal enemies. Dragons are agents of evil whose only impulse is to destroy.
The evil thing is strutting along the ledge above the portview right now.
I shake my head and go back to scrubbing the day’s grime from my face and wrists.
“You’re right, they probably don’t use words the way we do,” Thea says. “I’ll name her then.”
So far what I know about Thea is no more helpful than when all I knew were rumors. She draws, even if the paper will decompose. She pilots the phib. She reads the marsh.
She thinks a dragon baby can be named.
She may not be bossy, but she’s not shy, either. She laughs a lot.
I turn in for the night and dream of Jess wandering through sandpits under a mud moon.
In the morning, I’m clearer. The dragon is our prisoner, not our cargo.
“Her name is Marigold,” Thea says when I emerge from my bunk.
She’s made something that has both caffeine and alcohol in it for a morning drink, so she can name the damned thing whatever she wants if she leaves me alone with whiskey, black.
“If you’re up to it, we might go faster with two of us trancing,” she says after a while.
If she’s going to call the shots, she should just say so.
I toss back the rest of the drink and grab my gear to go tend to the boks. “The next section isn’t for speed,” I say, and I can’t help the surliness in my voice.
“Ah,” Thea says.
It’s not. What does faster even mean, out here? The leylines swoop towards us and ripple away in our wake, but relative distance across the marsh is a more muddled affair. Hazards loom, gather, multiply – whether mold or beast, they’re all demons, trying to turn us back. You don’t rush headlong into demons.
I eye our prisoner. “She’s not a Marigold,” I add, before stepping out the front hatch with the boks’ feedbags.
The marsh is a deadly kaleidoscope. As you turn your head, fragments bloom in the corner of your gaze, just out of focus, repeated, changed, and it’s never the same twice.
So look at it, if you get a chance. You’re seeing something no one else has or will, every time.
At the moment, it’s mushrooms, shearing up the side of the phib, silver-gray balloons and tentacles of nonsensical fungus, glistening in the marsh’s flat light. We don’t touch it, nor do the boks taste it. It’s poison.
Poison can be gloriously beautiful too.
Like Thea’s dragon.
Like Thea herself. Her pale eyes fringed with blond lashes, clear skin that has never been marred.
Of course it isn’t marred, because she’s been in a cushy chair, thanks to old money.
Thea’s a beautiful poison.
I avoid the fungus and feed the boks. They’ve become a refuge for me: Jess loved them and there’s nothing complicated to catalogue and resent. Simply take care of them.
Jess had named them: Mistral and Stormy. I go for more practical names, like Blue or Tiny. Who’s going to know which is which if they’re both named after the fucking weather?
Or a dragon with a flower name, oh my god.
So Mistral is Blue, to me, because of the color in her mane when the light catches it just right. I check her feet, her gut, the whites of her eyes. I nuzzle her neck. “I’m sorry Jess isn’t here,” I whisper to her. I give her extra cubes, like Jess would have, and I let her puff warm thank-you air back onto the top of my head, and then I hook up the harness.
Everything is still out of order in the marsh. We’re watching our event horizon for oatmeal when puddles of the goo appear on our flank without warning.
The marsh path is narrow, and the oatmeal is ridiculously responsive to the phib. We manage, but the maneuvering is exhausting.
Little rich girl watches from the top deck in fascination, which is maddening – but. She is keeping up with the phib tasks, and I haven’t trained her on any of it.
She’s competent, I’ll give her that.
“What about Diamond?” she says suddenly.
I have no idea what she’s saying.
That’s when I realize she has the fucking dragon up here on the deck. It totters off the railing and flaps awkwardly.
“It’s going to fall!” I lunge forward, but the beast regains its perch and hisses fire at me. “Gods, Thea. It’s going to fly away.”
But it’s not trying to do any such thing. It’s edging closer to Thea. I glare at both of them and stomp below. If we lose the mission objective, it’s on her. It’s on the council.
Everything is hopeless. We keep having to jog further and further west to skirt the oatmeal, adding days to the leg, and she’s training a demon.
Whose name is now Presto.
And despite all this, somehow, Thea becomes less annoying each day. Partly it’s the distraction. She’s nothing like Jess, which means I’m not jolting at familiar gestures or spooking when she comes down the ladder.
She’s made of legs, long golden legs that go on forever until I jerk my gaze away. She’d stand out in a crowded mess hall – here in the gray soup of the marsh she’s a supernova.
“Watch,” she says. “Safe!”
The dragon swoops across the phib and darts into the safe on the wall, hissing happily.
Thea laughs with pleasure. “I can keep her out of our way anytime now.”
“It understands language,” I say. That seems important.
“I don’t know,” Thea says. “She’s quick on the uptake, for sure.”
I put my cap on and step up to plug in. “Try not to let it burn the place down while I’m trancing.”
“Her,” Thea says. “Okay.”
Her good-naturedness is a little annoying.
The oatmeal seems meaner, if that’s possible. It’s chasing our tires, harassing the boks.
I pull the boks as far over as possible and call out to Thea. “I think we need to hit it with something.”
“How about fire?” She sounds positively gleeful, and I duck out of the gloom to look at her. “I’ve never used a flamethrower before,” she says.
I swear, the dragon is hissing through the portview at the oatmeal, like she’s on our team or something.
“She’s going to melt the plex,” I say.
It’s not until I see Thea’s grin that I realize I’ve called the dragon she. I sigh, slip under again, and steer the boks, ignoring her and the dragon until we’ve outpaced the oatmeal by a more comfortable margin.
When I emerge, there’s no sign of Marigold Diamond Presto, and Thea has spread out a handful of tablets. The humidity is rough on electronics, but it’s better than her paper sketchbook. The mold doesn’t eat it up like wood stuff. “I thought maybe we could plot some possible spots where Jess....” She pauses and looks uncertain.
“Jess’s body. You can say it. I know she’s dead.” My voice
is harsh.
Something flickers in her expression, but she turns to the tablets instead of replying.
“Maps are no good, you know that,” I say. “You can’t map the marsh.”
“I know,” she says.
Whatever softness I had developed towards this rich guildie is gone already.
But she looks bleakly at the tablets and I feel a twinge of something.
Because the oatmeal was anomalously early in the journey and so aggressive, it takes an entire day to get to a safe place to let the boks graze, and we collapse wordlessly into our bunks.
I dream.
Jess, dripping with ichor and blood and screaming, clouds of stinging dragonflies that turn out to be reptiles, the ground turning to muck under my feet when I try to run to Jess. Someone is bleeding, I have to stop the bleeding, and I’m hip-deep in the writhing marsh.
“Lucy, Lucy.” Arms are around me and I jerk away, arching my back to escape. “Lucy, I’m here, you’re okay!” I stop struggling when I realize the screams are coming from me. In the dark, I can’t see her, but it’s Thea holding me.
Everything is confusing. “I wasn’t always alone, I had a twin,” I say.
“You’re dreaming,” she says, pushing my hair back from my face. I try to resist but I still seem to be stuck in quicksand. “Hush, you’re dreaming, you’re safe.”
“Not safe. Never safe.” I tremble in her arms for a long time. She must have leapt into my bunk when I started shouting, and she’s sort of wedged up against me.
When the trembling stills, my words just tumble out. “The twin wasn’t a dream. She died when we were born. They said it wasn’t possible, for me to remember. But I do remember. I’m always left alone.”
I don’t know why that’s important to tell her now, but I go back to sleep and the nightmares don’t return this night.
“You’re not alone now,” I think I hear her say.
ACT II
When I wake, Thea’s not in my bunk, and I smell rations cooking and hear her crooning. “Come on, Mouse,” she is saying.
Another name for the thing of evil?
Which is – bigger.
“Should you be feeding her?” I say, creaking to my feet.
“Good morning, sunshine,” she says. “And yes, you should feed babies.”
“Baby demons,” I mutter and head into the washroom.
“I have theories about that,” she shouts through the door.
Funny. Thea has theories.
It’s the nightmares making me cranky.
The dragon – Mouse? She thinks Mouse is a good name for a dragon – okay. Whatever. Mouse is bobbing and flipping around the ladder. It’s clearly trying to communicate with her, and when Thea doesn’t get up, Mouse flaps over to me and makes obvious feints at the ladder.
You know what, if the damned thing escapes, that’s fine. Easy ride. I open the turret hatch and Mouse flies up to make a circuit around the phib while trilling happily. Her baby scales fluoresce against the low fog.
Thea smiles at me, a genuine, shot-to-the-heart smile from the most gorgeous rider, certainly, in this sector. I stumble to the table for caffeine.
“Tell me your theory about Mouse,” I say.
She suddenly seems tongue-tied. Guild leaders always seem to have their wits about them, and this one certainly does, so to have her on her back foot is – curious.
“I don’t think she’s demonic,” Thea finally says.
Mouse certainly doesn’t seem demonic. She acts like a baby animal, and I didn’t expect that. She hisses at us, but so would a kitten.
“Kittens grow up to be cats,” I say under my breath.
“Yes.”
I cut us each some raspberry cube and hand Thea hers. She gives me another one of those power smiles in return. I try not to grin like a kid.
If the oatmeal is acting up, other features of the swamp run seem to be keeping to their accustomed patterns. Thea offers to pilot the coming mist segment and plugs in.
I stay on the upper deck with her – the hell swamp mist can be a bit nightmarish the first time, though its mutant inhabitants, while grotesque, mostly leave us alone. Leathery birdlike things with great scissoring beaks swoop and chitter over the phib, looking for equally mutated grubs. And moths! Moths larger than vultures, with feet like pom-poms and wings that can bruise a girl if she stands up in the turret and it zigs the wrong way.
Vipers everywhere, like they’re the waste product of everything else, squirming up vines and snatching chimeric insects, or wrestling in reproductive tangles as the phib swishes by.
And there are other unnamable things, hybrids evolving before your eyes. Time accelerates in the swamp mist. Nothing is still.
After a while we emerge. The boks are cruising along. I needn’t have worried about Thea – she unplugs casually. “This should be a relatively clear stretch before the geysers and hot pools.”
“Where’s your lizard?” I ask her.
Thea leans on the rail and scans the horizon, flipping between eyepieces on her marshcap. “Sleeping,” she says. “The oatmeal is still following us.”
I glance behind and duck under the gloom briefly. “It’s plenty far back at this point. Not an immediate concern.”
She’s competent, that’s clear, and she takes orders even from a rider scrub like me, and she has some magic chops. She nods quietly.
She has no problem admitting she doesn’t know something. That’s not at all what I expected from rich girl Thea. She’s actually easy, even useful, to have along.
But I have no idea why she’s here, not a strap askew, like a photo of what a rider should look like instead of an actual rider.
She keeps sweeping the horizon, like it will help at all. She’s a ley mage. She should know vision alone is nothing out here.
“What are you doing?” I ask. “What could you possibly be looking for?”
“Jess.”
This again. I’m off the bench and down the ladder and away from her before I even know I’m moving.
This is not a search mission.
There is no such thing as searching the fucking marsh.
I don’t want to be here with Thea if that’s what she thinks we’re doing.
“Hey,” she says. “Hey, I’m sorry.”
I’m practically shaking. Suddenly the phib feels way too small. “I shouldn’t have come on a run so soon.”
She leads me to the fore table and guides me by my shoulders onto the bench. Her hands are strong and sure.
“Maybe not, but we’re here now.”
I still can’t meet her eyes. “Thea, you can’t search the marsh.”
She pulls some rations out of the cooler – a cheesy thing and a fruit block and puts together a fast wrap. “You’re not eating much, I’ve noticed.”
Mouse shows up at the smell of food. No wonder she’s growing so fast. Thea pushes a piece towards her, and she takes it in one claw and nibbles at it. You would almost say daintily.
“What, she needs to eat,” Thea says at my look. She points at the wrap and stares me down.
I’m a mess, but I take the food. “She’s doubled in size,” I say. “She won’t fit in the safe if she grows any bigger.”
“The safe’s not right for her anyway,” Thea says, and her tone has an unfamiliar sharpness. I’ve heard her quiet competent voice, and her cooing-to-a-baby-dragon voice, but not this guild leader note of command.
I eat the wrap in silence.
“The marsh is not searchable,” I say when I’m done. “It’s just not. It’s impossible.”
“I can’t leave her out here.”
“She was my partner, Thea. Why do you care?” I feel like I’m picking a meaningless fight and I can’t stop myself.
“I care,” she says.
The dragon, all this time, is swinging her head between us as we spit out our words, like a kid watching grownups fight.
“What, were you lovers or something?” I don’t necessarily k
now everything Jess got up to in station. Maybe she was Thea’s girlfriend. Which would make Thea’s presence here worse. A rich girl who bought her way into the guild and is now chasing the ghost of her dead lover. Perfect.
“No!” Thea says in something like a fury.
Mouse grabs the rest of the cheesy block and flaps triumphantly up to her favorite perch.
“You’re – you’re –” Thea says, stammering for the right term for whatever I am. “Very irritating,” she finishes.
“Me!”
She flings the fruit back into the cooler, pointedly flips her optics array down over one eye, and follows Mouse up the ladder, presumably to do more searching.
I sit with just my self-satisfaction for company. I knew she was spoiled and shallow. It was going to come out eventually.
“There’s – something ahead.” Thea is still acting coolly hostile, which is fine. Better to know how someone feels than be made a fool of.
“Geysers?” That would be about right.
“Nope. Nothing I’ve heard of.”
I clamber into the turret. At first I think what I’m seeing is a small mountain, of which there are none in the marsh, until I realize it’s moving. I stare. Even Mouse seems subdued, and the boks are acting skittish. I flip my own optics array into place and plug in, trying to puzzle it out.
Things breed in the marsh, that’s known. They breed a lot, with each other, across species, randomly, in combinations that just shouldn’t be. It’s as if even rocks are not what they appear to be, but are actually protoplasm in the shape of rocks. Seriously, that’s how golems came about – trees and slugs getting up to no good with rocks.
This new thing? I think a rhinoceros bred with a cobra and a cactus, the product of which then had a load of shit piled on it to see what would happen and what happened was more shit grew. It’s a shit mountain with ivory spines dripping venom and legs like battering rams.
“Now flamethrowers?” Thea says hopefully.
Through Death Page 2