“I must have missed something, have I? Did somebody ask you a fucking question?”
Unable to shake her head and near gagging on her own spit, Mira choked out a garbled response, hoping that the brigand would interpret it correctly. Lyssa pressed the blade harder against her skin, and Mira clenched her teeth so tightly that she thought they might crack. Finally, the pressure relented. Lyssa removed the knife and whispered into her ear.
“Now then, who’s in charge here, dearie?”
Mira swallowed, her saliva thickened with blood.
“You are.”
“One word from me and Salis will be getting his wish to fuck you bloody while we all watch, so you keep that in mind next time you’ve got a notion to open that pretty mouth of yours, got it?”
Mira nodded as she watched the filth-encrusted thug rummaging through her wagon.
Lyssa pulled her off the ground and set her up on her knees.
The girl had gone to tend to the horse, but she kept stealing glances at Mira every so often. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
Lyssa went back to twirling her knife.
“How long has your delver been down there?” she asked.
“Near on a week.”
“He hit bottom yet?”
“Maybe. Line’s been still for a while.”
Lyssa yanked Mira to her feet.
“Haul him up, then, and let’s have a see what’s he’s got for us.”
Mira shook her head.
“I can’t bring the line up yet.”
Lyssa smiled, her jagged teeth glistening with saliva.
“You can’t? Or you won’t?”
“He won’t hook anything he finds to the line until he’s ready to come up.”
Salis groaned.
“Fuck sake. This ain’t worth the risk. How long you plan to sit around waiting for this to pay out?”
“Shut up, Salis,” Lyssa said. “There’s a good reason you ain’t the one doing the thinking around here.” She turned to the girl. “Find anything to drink?
The girl offered Lyssa one of the wineskins tucked under the bag of jerky. She gulped down about a third of it in one swig.
“Not bad. Better than nothing leastways.” She wiped the corner of her mouth with her coat sleeve. “Ain’t had a decent drink since we left Tarrow.”
Mira gave her room enough to talk if she wanted. Sellswords and common soldiers didn’t often care for silence. It sounded too much like death.
Lyssa tossed the wineskin aside and sighed. “Should’ve wintered there. Garrison pay was shit, but it would’ve been enough to see us through to spring. Fighting might shift by then, take us somewhere warmer than this witch’s cunt of a country.”
Tarrow was three weeks to the south, a difficult ride across war-ravaged country. The city of Iothic used to split the distance between Tarrow and Dristbane. Mira wintered there once when she was younger, maybe as young as the brigand girl with the horse. Rumor had it that scavengers and refugees now squatted amidst what remained of the place.
“What’s the nearest town from here?”
“Madroc. Forty miles north.”
Lyssa rubbed her forehead.
“Long way to walk this time of year.”
Mira didn’t like the way Lyssa stared at the wagon. There would be plenty of room there for the three brigands if they cut the winch loose. If Lyssa got it in her head that they were better off making for Madroc without waiting for the line to come up, Mira had a feeling they wouldn’t want to bother hauling a prisoner along.
Something moved near the lip of the sinkhole. She glanced over and saw a white rat running along the line toward the winch.
Lyssa saw it too.
“That your delver’s signal?”
Mira nodded.
“Salis, get that thing running.”
“Wait,” Mira said. “Let me do it. He’s liable to strip out the gears”
Lyssa glared at her, then pulled her up and cut her bonds.
“Keep a close eye on her, Salis.”
The brigand trained his musket on Mira as she approached.
Mira locked the winch’s gears into position and turned the crank to begin reeling in the line. The first few revolutions were hard, but once the winding mechanism got underway, the work became much easier. Within a few minutes, the line coiled around the spool quickly, eating up several yards with every turn of the crank.
When Lyssa went to peer into the sinkhole, Mira saw her chance.
She eased off on the crank, acting as if it had grown difficult to turn.
“Gears are getting dry,” she said to Salis. “Grab some lard from that cask and wipe it on the gears, will you?”
Grumbling, the brigand set his musket down and scooped up a fistful of lard.
“Right there,” Mira said, nodding at the array of interlocking, exposed gears.
When Salis leaned toward the winch, she reached over, shoved him forward, and let go of the crank.
The spinning gears caught his sleeve and pulled him into the gears up to his elbow, his bones crunching loudly beneath the metal teeth. He screamed and tried to pull away, but Mira smashed his face against the winch’s metal frame and snatched up his musket. She slammed the musket’s butt against the back of his skull, cracking it like an overripe rockbill egg.
But dealing with Salis cost her precious seconds, enough time for Lyssa to react to her betrayal. She lunged at Mira and hauled her out of the wagon, sending the musket flying through the air. They crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs.
Mira tried to roll away and locate the musket, but Lyssa caught her by the hair before she could get clear.
“You bitch!”
Mira remembered Lyssa’s wretched knife as the brigand yanked her head back. She clenched her teeth, expecting to feel the dull blade sawing into her windpipe any moment.
Instead, she heard a gunshot.
Lyssa cried out and let go of her hair. Mira rolled away and got to her knees. She found the wolf-faced woman lying face down on the ground, gasping wetly for air. Each breath brought up a bit of blood and her limbs twitched haphazardly. A fresh splotch of blood in the center of her back grew steadily larger with each breath, and her limbs twitched haphazardly.
Shattered spine. Probably a punctured lung as well.
Bad way to go.
The girl stood a short distance beyond the wounded brigand, smoking musket in hand. She stared at Lyssa for a few seconds before she dropped the weapon and sat down next to the campfire.
Mira joined the girl after she caught her breath. She looked like she was sobbing, but didn’t make a sound while she did it.
That kind of crying took practice.
“What’s your name, girl?”
It took her a while to answer.
“E… Eaven,” she said, her voice trembling.
Gently, Mira placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder. She flinched, but didn’t pull away completely.
“Did they hurt you?”
Eaven nodded.
“How long?”
“Tarrow. Since Tarrow.”
Mira could have pressed her for details, but she knew they didn’t really matter. It made no difference why she left Tarrow in such ill company, only that she wouldn’t have to keep it any longer.
“We’ll be heading to Modroc once my delver gets topside. If you want to leave now, I won’t stop you, but it’d be wiser if you stick with us till then.”
The girl wouldn’t look at her, but she nodded.
“My name’s Mirasel,” she said. “But you can call me Mira.”
A few yards away, Lyssa managed to flop over onto her back. Her breathing sounded thicker, like she’d swallowed a glob of cold honey.
Eaven glanced back at her. For a moment, her bruised face betrayed a hint of pity.
“Should we…”
Mira grunted.
“Fuck her. Let the bitch bleed.”
Eaven, looking a little relieved, nodded
.
“Come help me pull that other bastard out of the gears,” Mira said. “If we’re lucky, we’ve got a payday on the other end of that line.”
It took them the better part of an hour to clear what remained of Salis from the machinery. They dumped it behind one of the old houses along with Lyssa’s corpse. After they finished, Mira once again locked the gears into position and turned the winch’s crank to haul up the line.
Corver finally emerged from the sinkhole just after midday. Mira helped him over the ledge and unbuckled the hooks that secured him to the line. A layer of dirt and soot covered most of his body.
“Well?” Mira asked. “Don’t keep us in suspense. What’d you find?”
He grunted.
“Nice to see you too, love of my life.”
Mira hated being called that. Many things described their marriage, but love was not one of them. She glared at him until he stopped grinning.
“Maybe scrounged up enough to keep us going for a bit,” Corver said. “Nothing we can retire on, though.”
Mira went back to turning the crank. The large sacks tied to the end of the line emerged next. Corver stacked them with the rest of their supplies.
“Odds and ends, mostly,” he said. “We weren’t the first that’s been here. Most of the good stuff got picked clean, probably a few years back from the looks of it.”
Corver finally noticed Eaven tending to the campfire when he sat down to dust off his clothing.
“Who the hell’s this?”
“Name’s Eaven,” Mira said. “Family’s been dead a while. Told her she could ride with us far as Modroc.”
Corver shrugged.
“Whatever. Where’s Parick?”
“Haven’t seen him since this morning. Horse came back without him.”
“Could be a bad sign,” he said. “We’d best get moving. You need a hand with that crank?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Suit yourself. Anything exciting happen while I was gone?”
Mira shook her head.
“Nothing I couldn’t manage.”
Lena’s Song
Originally published in Darkscapes (Curiosity Quills Press, 2017)
Set in the same dystopian future as “The First Price,” this story took a similar approach by depicting the lives of relatively ordinary people in a cyberpunk-styled world. I’m not sure where the inspiration came from to work in the music angle, but everything flowed from the promise of those first few lines. The ending was changed at an editor’s suggestion, and while they thought it was more uplifting than the original version, I’m not so sure. In some ways, this ending felt a bit more unsettling. Naturally, I considered that an improvement. Both this story and “The First Price” would later get reimagined as songs when I recorded the Morana’s Breath album, Cybergothic. It was an interesting experience trying to convey the same themes in a different medium.
The guitar case sat on the top shelf inside her grandfather’s closet for as long as Lena could remember. She was probably five or six when she noticed it for the first time, its cracked black leather hide peeking out from beneath a folded blanket. When she asked him about it, he brushed her questions aside.
No, it was nothing special.
No, he hadn’t taken it out of the case in years.
No, he didn’t know how much it was worth.
And no, under no circumstances could she see it.
Lena would sneak off to stare at the dried-out case every time she visited. When she was nine, she started taking guitar lessons through her school. While she liked music and enjoyed playing, a part of her only did it in the hope that maybe, someday, if she knew how to play, her grandfather would pull the case out of the closet and let her see it or even touch it.
But it never happened.
She told him about how much she’d learned about playing any time she saw him. It didn’t matter if he seemed indifferent, annoyed even, by her interest in music. Proving her skill to him became an obsession. She kept hoping for the day he might deem her worthy of opening that ancient, crackled case.
Even raising the subject put him in a foul mood. It didn’t matter how well she played, he would tell her, because in the end, nobody really listens.
They devour, leaving nothing but the gnarled bones of something that was once beautiful behind.
He died when she was seventeen.
When Marcus stepped out of the monorail car, the messages rained down on him like hailstones. Names and abbreviated symbols flashed across his field of vision as he walked across the loading platform, his retinal displays siphoning a torrent of correspondence out of the aether and carefully organizing it into predetermined categories. There were messages from his supervisors telling him about their agenda for tomorrow, personal notes from clients to offer thanks for services rendered or bring future opportunities to his attention, and the seemingly endless stream of enthused comments from his friends.
The display filtered his friends into the neat categories he’d spent a great deal of time designating. He ignored most of them, the ones that didn’t require a response; the others got an automated reply from the Fastchatter program, which he’d also spent a lot of time tweaking to best emulate his personality in its responses.
Nothing there warranted his direct attention. In all likelihood, the messages hadn’t demanded the attention of their senders, either.
Marcus usually stopped at the bar on his way home from the office. It was less than a block from his flat, its tables thrusting out into the street in an eager attempt to distract him from getting anywhere. As he drew closer to it, more alerts flashed in his display.
Jared was already inside. Elise, too. They were drinking the same things they drank every night after work; a scotch on the rocks for Jared because it made him feel like a “grown-up,” and something fruity and colorful for Elise so she could pretend she was a decade younger.
Their networks noticed him before he walked past the door.
You’re late.
Jared’s message passed through his filters, receiving the preferential treatment he accorded to people he actually associated with on occasion.
Better come catch up, Elise added, her message pushing to the top of the alert queue.
Of course, neither Jared nor Elise were actually talking to him. They were too busy making conversation inside to be bothered with the trouble. Their quick, patronizing replies were personable, but preprogrammed—canned, context sensitive greetings triggered by his network’s proximity to theirs.
Marcus returned the favor, allowing his Fastchatter to field their messages as he strode past the bar. He spent his days sitting in on tedious meetings and virtual conferences; banal barroom conversation wasn’t much better. The routine of unwinding after work was almost as insufferable as the work itself.
Not tonight. Got plans.
Lena stepped out of the van and looked over the venue’s exterior. The decrepit, brick building seemed ready to collapse in the face of a stiff wind. Metal bars were riveted over the windows on the first three floors; the windows above them were boarded up completely. Loose bricks had fallen away from sections of the upper stories and the salt-laden air had left behind ugly, white streaks that gashed unevenly across the building’s surface.
The theater marquee had torn free of the rusted wall moorings at some point, but an electronic billboard about the size of a car had been crudely affixed in its place. A thick layer of dirt and grime had piled up in the corners of the screen, which was itself marred by clusters of spider web-like cracks. It wasn’t clear if the screen still worked.
“Are you sure this is it?” she asked.
Chris slid out of the driver’s seat to join her. “Yeah. Sure is.”
“It looks like it should be condemned,” she said.
“It’s a historic landmark! You can’t just knock places like this down. There’s, like, laws and stuff.”
Trevor leaned out the passenger window. “Yeah, this plac
e used to be the shit. Did you know Worldwide Fire Drill played here back in the day?”
Lena groaned. “Yes, you haven’t shut up about it for three days.”
Before Trevor could reply, the door below the screen swung open. A muscular man in a black jacket stood in the doorway glowering at them, his ugly face a scrapyard of piercings, scars, and tattoos.
“The fuck you doing out here?”
Chris offered a limp-wristed wave. Lena noticed he was shaking.
“Hey, man, we’re just checking the place out before—”
“Shut up and pull that piece of shit around back. The show’s inside, not in the middle of the fucking street.”
He slammed the door shut without further instruction.
“Are you sure about these people?” Lena asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” Chris said, climbing back into the van. “It’ll be fine.”
The engine sputtered to life after a few cranks.
“Come on,” Chris said.
Lena shook her head as she got back in the van. Her right hand fell to the guitar case on the seat next to her, tracing the contours of the cracks scarring its leathery surface.
It didn’t make her feel any better.
The Pasadena gate was busy at all hours of the day as workers who lived outside the corporate enclave cycled through the security checkpoint. Hundreds of armed security personnel were stationed there, some manning the automated passport scanners which identified every car and pedestrian passing through the gate, some performing random searches, and others watching over the commuters from fortified positions built into the polycrete enclave wall. The security check process was mercifully efficient; although the lines were long, they moved quickly, cycling a steady stream of workers into the enclave to replace those who were leaving.
Of course, as a resident enclave citizen, Marcus didn’t have to bother waiting. He stepped around the lines and past the exhausted workers without a word. They avoided direct eye contact with him, but Marcus caught a few of the unpleasant glares directed his way. He noticed familiar uniforms as he walked between the orderly lines, each one marking the wearers as restaurant servers, sales clerks, maintenance personnel, and the like.
Distant Worlds Volume 2 Page 15