Through Death

by Parker Jaysen

  I imagine a flaming mutant rhino lumbering after us, and it’s not an improvement.

  But it’s not coming towards us. We can go around.

  The boks veer suddenly, and Thea and I jump at the same instant to rein them in. We lean into the gloom, her hand between my shoulder blades. Everything twists and I struggle to realign the grids, and somehow I know Thea is struggling too.

  What is the marsh up to?

  “I know Jess is dead,” Thea says over mushroom wraps. “Please don’t bolt. Hear me out.”

  I’m half out of the chair, but I sit back down.

  “The marsh is obviously weirding more than usual. Don’t you think it could have something to do with Jess?”

  The idea of the marsh swallowing Jess alive has haunted me; the notion that it is changing as a result is sickening. I’ve been with riders who formed strange notions, the marsh will do that to you. But Thea is not some wide-eyed recruit. Her matter-of-factness makes me shudder.

  I chew mushrooms angrily. “I don’t know what you mean. The marsh eats everything. Why would Jess have anything to do with the changes?”

  “I don’t know.” She frowns. “I just don’t trust changes.” She pulls the marshcap over the circle of braids pinned up like a golden crown on her head. “I’ll do one more look.”

  “That’s all the marsh does, is change. The marsh is change,” I shout after her.

  Anyway, Jess’s death isn’t the only new thing. I glare at Mouse tidily pecking away at dinner crumbs.

  The nightmares come back. Slavering rhinos stomping on Jess, vultures tearing her to shreds, oatmeal pulling her under.

  I’m unable to waken fully and calm the pounding in my chest until Thea puts her cool hands on my cheeks, my neck, my forehead. And the nightmares resume unless she stays.

  We don’t talk about it, but she starts sleeping in my bunk every night. I can sleep with her there, arms around me in the deep of night.

  Now I dream of leylines, shimmering pulses that I follow to the sea, and the song of a woman in a language I don’t recognize.

  On the twelfth morning, there are more of the rhino mountains. More as in herds of them. Mouse is now the size of a station cat, and she flaps at the portviews so hard they rattle.

  “I think she thinks she can take them,” Thea says with a delighted laugh.

  “She’s going to take the plex right out, if she keeps flaming it.”

  “Mouse, come back here,” Thea says, and the dragon comes to her.

  I am not sure when she was last in the safe, or if she’d even fit now. Did I mention the mission is completely fucked?

  I step into the turret and plug in. Every possible line for us ends at a herd of rhinos, occluding the time horizon like distant alps. “I don’t think there’s a way around.”

  Before Thea can reply, there’s a change. While I watch, the rhinos part, leaving one path open.

  We now have a dilemma. Are they really letting us through? Are they waiting until we’re between the groups to close up and stomp us? Are there really multiple herds, or is it a time-dilated mirage of some sort?

  “They’re luring us to their queen, or whatever is worse than twenty turd rhinos,” says Thea, after plugging in, displaying a dark humor I hadn’t guessed she had. We grin at each other nervously.

  Thea hits the comms to see if anyone in station has any useful advice, while I duck back under the gloom. I need to evaluate our options for retreat.

  Motivation is the one thing trancing won’t tell us. In our magical grasp the marshscape intersects with the ley sphere, and that interaction tells us almost everything – range, direction, speed, EM fields – just not why.

  It doesn’t tell us what the rhinos want or whether they’re intentionally or accidentally blocking our path. A retreat to an alternate route could end the same way.

  But that’s the reluctant consensus, I can hear Thea and Maura sort of arguing. The station comm is scratchy and faint. “We’ve already lost a rider, don’t risk two more and a phib and the cargo,” says Maura.

  I blink out of the gloom and look down at the cargo, which is crouched on Thea’s unused bunk, stalking a boot.

  It’s sensible. We’ll go back and pick up another branch southward.

  The marsh doesn’t mind retreats. Even the smallest moth ignores us as we pull up the boks and turn around to march into our own wake.

  It’s possibly the safest thing a marsh rider can do.

  Thea did not know this. She is agog, watching out the side ports as the marsh just calmly goes about its swampy business. No carnivorous vines lashing at us, no mutant albatrosses or shrieking dragonflies.

  It’s peaceful.

  But Thea seems to take it as a challenge. She doesn’t stop scanning the horizon, she doesn’t stint on the checklists or rations – and at night she doesn’t turn toward her own bunk instead of mine.

  If I’m safer for a night while backtracking, will the nightmares retreat? She doesn’t seem to want to leave it to chance.

  I lay awake. I’m used to Thea next to me. Maybe it’s the quiet. Maybe it’s knowing that the quiet could be a ruse. What does the marsh want of us? Where is our path from here? Puzzling it out sometimes helps sleep come.

  I’m highly aware of her next to me, and despite the pitch black, I remember exactly what she wore to sleep. Olive tank top, loose but not too loose, gray shorts. She braids her hair for the marshcap, but she lets it down at night.

  Thea’s presence is more real than any ley sense or optics display.

  I’m in the dark in the middle of hell, and I’m picturing the exact shade of green of her tank top.

  I turn to her, like it will help me see, and she turns to me. At the same time? Maybe.

  Her fingers are on my cheeks at the same time I touch her side.

  We are not much alike, maybe – my broad shoulders and darker skin, her long limbs and narrow hips – but in this rhythm we are in absolute sync.

  She kisses me, and I’m ready. I’m hungry for her, which shouldn’t surprise me. It’s been forever since I’ve been with someone. But not just someone – it’s Thea I’m hungry for.

  She is open-mouthed, not at all reserved. She tastes amazing.

  “I love the way you taste, Luce,” she whispers.

  A part of my brain marvels that she even knows me, let alone wants me. But she clearly does. She nibbles at my jawline as if to prove she likes my taste.

  I smile in the dark and she kisses my mouth again.

  Against my lips, she smiles, too.

  Again we’re in sync, as I reach for the hem of her shirt and she pulls the top button of my nightshirt free. “So many buttons,” she says. “What were you thinking?”

  “You wore a shirt,” I manage to say before she’s dipped her fingers into my nightshirt and found my breast – and anything more I’d say is lost.

  I said she’s competent. Oh my god. She understands my breast like it is her own. She knows the feather touch of her fingertips along my side, under my ribs, will make the muscles of my belly contract; I know she knows, because her other hand is ready, smoothing away the ripple.

  She sucks in a breath when I find her own nipple and then growls when I stop.

  She’s in no hurry. We’re in the dark on a wrong way turn in a hell swamp, and anyone in our place might be forgiven a furtive, desperate tumble in the sack. But I’ve been waiting my whole life for this breast, I think. I pull her nipple with my thumb and forefinger, and it – she – responds to me like she’s been waiting just as long for my touch.

  She resumes her journey of discovery of my stomach. She pauses at the feel of my navel ring and chuckles. Her chuckle is deep, aroused-sounding, and it makes my heart pound faster. “Now I’m intrigued.” She puts her ear on my breastbone and fiddles with the stone in the navel ring. “I will guess.”

  I can barely breathe, much less play riddles.

  “Magnetite?” She laughs and her breath tickles my skin. She’s playing with t
he stone with her fingers. “No. Way too conventional.”

  She suddenly stops and her fingers are not playful on the stone. “Oh, it is probably lapis.”

  How in the hellish four corners of this world did she guess that?

  “Lucy, twin. I’m guessing your twin was lapis.”

  She’s not just competent, she’s a fucking wizard, and I think I would do anything she asked. “Yes,” I think I say, and she raises her head to kiss me thoroughly.

  I’m naked to her.

  “You’re beautiful,” she says.

  “It’s dark.”

  “My memory works fine. So do my hands.”

  As I said, she’s competent. She knows what I want exactly as I want it. She reaches unerringly for me, soothing my twitching muscles as she walks her hands down my body until she’s poised, not touching me.

  “I hear your breath, I feel your heart,” she whispers. “Are you asking me to come in?”

  I’ve been holding back for a long time. “Yes,” I say again, and this time I say it clearly.

  Her fingers find me. She circles my clit but darts away to explore more, gliding down like she wants to memorize every inch of me. I’m holding my breath and don’t notice I’m doing it until she enters me with expert fingers and I gasp. “Don’t faint on me,” she laughs, her mouth finding mine again. She starts to tug upwards inside me, beckoning, just enough to keep me gasping and pushing up toward her hand.

  She knows me. How does she know me?

  By the time she comes back to my clit, I’m ready to come, and she knows it too. She teases me, featherlight fingers bringing me closer and then stopping, waiting the length of a breath.

  “Why?” I demand. Why is she not giving me – her head dips and she finds me with her mouth as easily as her hands. She’s got me.

  “Come for me, sweet Lucy,” she says, and I can’t hold back anything from this witch. I’m around her, in her, forever.

  I think I pass out from orgasm, or maybe she’s killed me and brought me back. I don’t care either way. I’m made of water or jelly, and I can’t move out of my happiness.

  “Um,” I finally come up with, and Thea laughs.

  “Yes, um.”

  Somewhere in the dark phib, the dragon hisses something, and Thea laughs again.

  I wake up in the morning, Thea wrapped around me, her braid half undone, her face burrowed into my neck.

  It’s a miracle.

  I know miracles aren’t for me, but I ignore the fact and just enjoy the feel of her before some dragon sound or breeze causes her to stir and the day is begun.

  We’re almost to the first available turning point on our backtrack; once we’re there, we’ll check in with Transit and pick one of the lines to follow.

  Mouse is shrieking at the rear view before we’re really underway.

  “Uh, Luce?” Thea goes to the back to see, and Mouse flutters up to her shoulder. She’ll be too big to do that within a day, I figure. As it is, I can see Thea wince as its talons dig into her.

  I follow them over to see. I’m still sluggish, despite my whiskey black, and it takes me a long second. The rhinos are following us.

  We need guidance. I open comms. Maura has a lot of ideas and even more questions. “How’s the cargo?” she asks carefully.

  I watch the cargo steal a package of rations and retreat to the top of the cooler. The dragon rips the package open like it’s done it a hundred times and gobbles up an impressive amount of a human’s one day supply.

  “The cargo is stable,” I say. Thea smiles at me and I flush and grin back.

  I’m not keeping the dragon situation from Maura for Thea’s sake. I just don’t really feel like arguing with guild leaders right now. And anyway, I don’t even know exactly what the situation is.

  I shake my head. I have a guild leader right here, practically in my lap. Her eyes are on mine and I can tell she’s practically reading my mind.

  At least about the lap idea. Her eyes drop to my belly, and below.

  “The rhinos are staying back,” Thea adds to the conversation. “They don’t seem aggressive.”

  Being followed by a dozen mutant rhinos each weighing several tons seems somehow aggro-adjacent, but I don’t argue the point.

  But the rhinos hang back as we start down the new alternate path. Like they just don’t want us to go the other way?

  While Thea’s in the gloom and steering, I brood on what mutant rhinos want or whether they even have wants, and if they do, what is their hellish aim, and why. Could we still assume, as marsh riders generally do, that to the extent any part of the marsh could be said to have an aim, that it is always to thwart the guild? That it’s no different than Paragon in the north, or Uther under the lake?

  The rhinos continue to stay well back, and Thea’s easy posture suggests this new path isn’t fighting us any more than the retreat was.

  It could be that this isn’t the right way to our destination either, and the marsh “knows” it.

  Not good.

  I duck under to double-check, but the lines spark away in the gloom at just the angles I expect. Glowing blips flit by, part of Earth’s ley network. Thea is on course.

  So what does the marsh “think” our destination actually is?

  Thea reaches out and squeezes my hand.

  ACT III

  Each time we’re in the gloom together, our mutual awareness of the other’s mood and timbre grows deeper.

  There’s a power in having her along, and I’m not talking about her amazing fingers, although – god, the woman is ferocious in bed.

  But she picks up skills like some people pick up tunes. She steers the boks like she’s known them her whole life. She made an omelet with egg powder. Is that even possible?

  “Why did you come?” I ask her, carelessly.

  She clears her eyes from the gloom and stares at me. “You tell me,” she says.

  I blush as I remember last night. She seems to find me reasonably skilled as well. I blush hotter.

  “You were alone. They were going to send you solo,” she says after a minute.

  There’s a lot to unpack here. The guild has procedures for replacing a rider. It happens all the time. Did Thea volunteer, or draw the short straw?

  But what comes out is, “when did you start referring to the council as they?”

  “Since you.” Her innuendo is clear, and I flush yet again. But she means something more, too. “Look at us. Look at Mouse. This mission – what was their plan? After Jess, it was pretty clear there would be no answers in station.”

  “Answers to what?” I say, but I think I know what she means. I felt it myself before we left, a buzz, a whirl of secrets among strained factions, with the dragon at its center. “Can you go back? I mean, have you burned bridges?”

  “Honestly? I think some of them are hoping we disappear. It would solve their problem. You heard Maura on the comm. They are clueless. Don’t risk the phib!” She practically spits. “But somebody wanted a live dragon egg, and now they want the live dragon just as badly. The world is changing. If we riders have to deal with the fallout, we should have a say, as well.”

  Otherwise Jess died for nothing. She doesn’t put it into words and I love her for that, more than for her dazzling competence or even her deft, knowing fingers.

  The marsh might not be trying to prevent us from traveling, but even a benign marsh is not exactly hospitable. Today it’s midgies, the blue ones the size of my thumb and with razors for appendages. The phib jolts and swerves as the boks try to shake them off, and even Mouse seems a little seasick.

  “She’s so huge.” I make the mistake of asking how much longer she’ll fit through the port to the upper deck, and Thea spends all fucking afternoon measuring and pacing and consulting with Mouse in a whisper singsong, while I monitor gloom and ley.

  “I think we should enlarge the opening,” she finally says.

  Okay, Thea is savvy enough to understand that the phib is not built to be cust
omized like that, not on a whim and not during a mission. I scowl at both of them. “Let her ride above.”

  “What if it rains?”

  Hell rain, she means, which will eat through everything but phib. The phib’s kit even includes a hell-rain canopy for the boks.

  “She can bunk with the boks,” I say.

  “They’ll love that,” Thea mutters.

  She’s out of breath with one tank-top strap off her shoulder and wisps of hair escaping her braids, and when she catches me looking she hooks a thumb in my belt and pulls me close for a sweaty kiss.

  I’m head over heels in lust with this rider.

  There are rhinos ahead. My adrenaline spikes – we’re technically surrounded.

  The boks have their ears back but otherwise don’t seem concerned.

  It annoys me that I glance at Mouse to see what she thinks. Dragons are mindless evil; I keep forgetting.

  But Mouse is calm enough. No hissing or screaming.

  We’re on a 100-kilometer detour with a dragon in the phib, and surrounded by things that might decide at any second to stomp us.

  “Halt,” I say to the boks.

  This is the slowest fucking marsh run in the history of marsh runs. By the time our cargo gets to its final destination, she’ll be rideable herself.

  A rideable evil killer, but rideable.

  I feel like I’m putting qualifiers on everything. The dragon is clever but evil. The partner is a miracle but not mine. The mission is fubarred but I keep pushing forward.

  I join Thea in the turret to make our navigation plan for the day, but she makes me watch Mouse first. The dragon is happily taking care of today’s midgies, dropping them one by one with little gusts of well-aimed fire and then tossing back their charred remains like kebabs.

  “She’s so cute,” my partner says.

  “Well, someone is cute,” I say without thinking, and Thea cuts me a startled glance of delight.

  “Cuteness everywhere,” she says. Her lips are soft and still have a faint whiskey taste from breakfast, and it would take no coaxing at all for me to head right back to the bunk with her. Unluckily, there’s work.