Binding Foxgirls III

by Simon Archer

  Nonetheless, they nodded. I checked the lifeboat one last time to ensure that they were right, and nothing had been left behind. Then, tentatively, I leaned forward and pushed it back out into the water with all the force that I could muster.

  “Hey, what d'you do that for?” Malthe cried out, pointing at the lifeboat as it drifted away out into the sea.

  “Yeah, we might need that thing to get back home,” Clem protested. I rolled my eyes at them.

  “That flimsy little thing wouldn’t get us anywhere,” I said. “We’re lucky it got us this far. And we don’t want anyone to find it and come looking for whoever was in it, now, do we?”

  “I guess not,” Malthe said, pursing his lips at it and hopping between his feet as he tried to regain his footing. “It’s just kind of weird, watching it float away like that. It’s the only thing we had other than our own two feet to travel with.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But this is just the way that it has to be for now. Now we have to find somewhere to stay for the night!”

  With that, I led everyone up the rocks. The climb was steep, and I had to help the foxgirls along the way through our bond, while Clem had to assist both Malthe and Lin. And our ill-fitting clothes made matters even worse for ourselves. But eventually, we made it where we needed to be.

  At the top of the rocks was a residential area, just like I’d expected. Together, we walked in silence down a paved road lined with houses, afraid to speak for fear of alerting anyone to our presence, searching for any sign of anything else that could lead us away from the houses.

  “When you talk, try to mimic those shippers’ accents,” I muttered after we’d gone on like this for some time.

  “What accents?” Lin hissed.

  “Did you hear them when you were in the crates?” I asked, looking around at everyone again.

  “Sort of, but it was pretty muffled,” Malthe said.

  “Shit,” I cursed. “I guess they did only really talk when they were carrying my crate, and after we attacked them. But you guys who were there for that remember what they sounded like, right?” Clem and the foxgirls all nodded, though hesitantly.

  “I think so,” Kira said, scrunching up her eyebrows as she thought hard about this. “I’m not entirely sure. I can try it.”

  “Me too,” Kinley and Kira said at once.

  “I can give it my best shot, Nic,” Clem said, though he didn’t look too confident about this.

  “All right, well, Malthe and Lin, don’t talk at all,” I instructed. “And if you can, the rest of you let me do the talking, too. I’m pretty sure I can remember it okay. And as we get to talking to people, we can work on it some more.”

  “Got it,” Malthe said, gulping audibly again in anxiety.

  “Hey, do you guys need a ride?” an accented voice called out from behind us, and we all just about jumped out of our skins. I turned to find a slick, long black wheeled vehicle pulling up behind us, which was odd since the only wheeled vehicles I had ever seen before were military tanks. But this didn’t look like anything like that. It was more of an air car but on land.

  I exchanged a look with Clem and made a decision, clearing my throat and preparing my voice to sound like the guy we were talking to, who sounded like the shippers but a little less gruff, a little more formal.

  “Um, sure,” I said, holding out a hand to Lin for the money pouch. She immediately knew what I meant and handed some bills to me. “Will this do the trick?” I handed a couple out to the guy who had rolled down his window and came up beside us.

  “Eh, sure,” he said, giving the bills a perfunctory look and then taking them from me. “I’m heading out of this area anyway, and you folks look kind of lost, so I can give you a discount.”

  “We appreciate that,” I said, exchanging a look with Lin this time. She stuck her nose in the pouch to begin counting what we hand, and I could see the wheels turning in her head as she tried to figure out how far that would get us in this place judging on the guy’s price.

  “Okay, get in,” the guy said cheerfully, pushing a button to slide the doors open and waving for us to climb inside. “Where’re you headed?”

  “The cheapest hotel we can find that has some tech we could use,” I said, taking care not to mention the holonet or anything else specific in case they had different terms for those things here.

  “What kind of tech?” the guy asked. “You need a computer with some Internet or something? And a TV?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure,” I said, looking to Malthe for confirmation, and he nodded. “That sounds good.”

  “Sure, pretty much any place will get you that much around these parts,” the guy said. “I’ll drop you off the first place I can find.”

  “Appreciated,” I said again. “So, what makes you think we look out of place?” I laughed so that I had an out to call it a joke if he thought that was a strange question.

  “Well, we don’t get many shipping types around here,” the guy chuckled, laughing along with me. “They mostly live on the other side of town. This is more of the uppity area, you know.”

  “Yeah, we figured,” I shrugged, gesturing at a particularly large house right outside my window.

  “You folks in from another continent?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, leaping at this opportunity. “We had some trouble. This wasn’t our destination. We had to stop to, uh, refuel.”

  “Headed to the Nether?” the guy asked.

  “Uh, yeah, that’s the one,” I said, and Cindra gave me a confused look. I just shrugged again.

  “Most everybody is,” the driver chuckled, not seeming to have noticed this nonverbal exchange. “Everybody wants to go to the Nether.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” I said, not wanting to question him further for fear of betraying just how little we actually knew about this world.

  We passed the rest of the ride listening to the guy’s radio. It was full of words that I didn’t quite understand, but it seemed like some kind of news program. Whoever it was talking a lot about this place called the Nether and some city called Direfall, then another word came up. A word that made me whip my head up in shock despite myself.

  “And Achilles Tibor is said to be headed to Direfall from Termina,” the radio guy said. “He has yet to conduct a press conference, but….” And then the rest of the sentence was drowned out by the driver who seemed to have noticed my strange reaction to Achilles’s name.

  “You’ve been out at sea for a while, huh?” he asked, though he didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “Shit’s been going down the past couple of weeks. Really hit the fan in Termina. They pulled all of Tibor Enterprises out of the place if you can believe it! There goes a couple of centuries of work, all out the window. People are freaking the fuck out.”

  “Yeah, I can imagine,” I said, laughing nervously. “We knew there was some weird stuff going on there when we left, but we haven’t kept up to date with the programs. I like to run a clean ship, no distractions.”

  “I can’t blame you,” the driver said. “This shit’s damn distracting, especially now. You folks wouldn’t have gotten any work done if you’d been clued into all the drama. You know, I never really got the draw of Termina myself. My wife loves watching them, with their weird voodoo ways, but now? Now, it’s more than just entertainment. This is real people’s lives we’re talking about here now. This is the real deal. It’s like they’ve completely lost control of the whole island! And what happens if one of them binders gets out? What then? We’re all damn well screwed, that’s what.”

  Clem’s eyes grew wide at this, and I couldn’t stop my heart from racing. Had he said binders? Like there aren’t any in the outside world? If so, that was damn good for our prospects of staying under the radar, though it didn’t make much sense why there wouldn’t be any binders out here.

  “Yeah, I’m just floored,” I said, not bothering to keep my shock off my face since I figured by th
e driver’s reaction that it was appropriate even if I wasn’t from Termina myself. “What’re they gonna do about it all?”

  “Who the fuck knows?” the driver cried, throwing up his arms and releasing the wheel momentarily to illustrate the force of his point. “Who the fuck knows anything anymore? I mean, it’s just all gone straight to hell, as far as I’m concerned. As far as anyone’s concerned! It’s not like this Achilles character is giving us any information. And I know they say these people don’t even know we exist, so they wouldn’t think to leave the island, but I’ll tell you what, if I had to live in a place like that, I’d be getting on the first ship out of there whether I thought there was anything to find on the continents or not.”

  “Damn straight,” I said, nodding along with him as I tried to process all of this information. “You’ve got that right.”

  “That’s right, I do,” the driver cried, getting even more excited now. “The next thing we know it, we’ll have a second Great Binding War! And then where will we be?”

  “Yeah, I don’t even know how to starting thinking about that,” I said honestly, exchanging another bemused look with Clem. A Great Binding War? What the fuck was that?

  “Oh, here we are,” the driver said, pulling into what looked to be some kind of parking lot for these wheeled air cars. There was a building in front of us with a flashing “Motel” sign hanging on its front.

  I looked around the area. I hadn’t even realized we’d left the residential zone since I’d been so absorbed in what the driver was saying. There were all kinds of other wheeled vehicles zooming around, and a bunch of business.

  “Uh, thanks again,” I told him. “We really, really appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” the guy said, waving away my thanks. “And hey, good luck to you. And to the lot of us, given what’s happening.”

  “You can say that again,” I said with another nervous laugh as I climbed out of the car. And with that, the driver departed, leaving us to head into the motel on our own.

  “What did he…?” Malthe began to ask, coming up next to me and grabbing my arm, but I shook his hand away and put my finger to my lips.

  “Wait until we’re alone,” I hissed, eyeing some people walking out of the hotel. They gave us an odd look, probably because we dressed so differently than they did. They were wearing cloth pants and shirts. The pants were a kind of light brown color, and the shirts were cotton and collared. Sort of like what we had in Termina, but way less flashy.

  “I think we need to find a change of clothes,” Cindra said, noticing this, too.

  “Let’s get checked in first,” I said, opening the door and holding it for the rest of my team.

  The inside was also vaguely like a cheap motel in Termina, but without all the fluorescent lights and flashy decor that was so characteristic of my home. It was like the same place, but toned way, way down. And with way less tech all over the place, though there was still some to be sure. There was a giant TV screen playing in the lobby, showing aerial shots of some kind of giant building.

  “Need a room?” the guy at the front desk asked absentmindedly. He gave us a brief, wary look when he saw our attire, but otherwise seemed fully absorbed in what looked to be some kind of computer at his desk.

  “You got one of those and one of those in the rooms?” I asked, pointing to the computer and the giant screen in turn, not wanting to get the words wrong.

  “Sure do,” the guy said, still entranced by the computer.

  “Then we’ll take one. Well, do you have a suite or something?” I asked.

  “Sure, we’ve got something like that,” he said. “Here are the keys. That’ll be eighty.” I looked to Lin, and she pulled several crumpled bills out of the pouch, counting them as she did so. I noticed for the first time that there were little numbers on them. Physical currency was hard to come by in Termina, though it wasn’t unheard of, especially for underground deals and off-market bindings.

  I picked up the key cards from the desk and passed them around to everyone.

  “Thanks,” I said, and once Lin had paid up, we quickly turned away.

  The room doors were outside since it was a motel. We climbed up to the top floor and then entered, peering behind us out of habit to make sure no one was watching first. Just as promised, there was one of those TV screens hanging on the wall opposite the couch and a thin computer sitting on the desk. There were only two rooms, so we would have to quadruple up.

  “Is there any kind of surveillance in here?” I asked Malthe, leaning in to speak in his ear.

  “Already on it, boss,” Malthe said, and he started searching around the room for any bugs or other contraptions to listen in on our conversations. Finally, he shook his head and shrugged.

  “Nothing?” I asked him.

  “Not that I can see,” he said. “It would be kind of weird to film their guests, anyway. And probably illegal. Plus, these people seem to just have less tech in general.”

  “Alright, then,” I said, tapping my bracelet and turning back to my usual self with some relief. Even though I couldn’t feel the thing altering my appearance, something about looking like a different person in and of itself was tiring.

  “What about clothes?” Cindra asked.

  “Oh, I thought I saw a shop downstairs,” Lin said. “I’ll go look.”

  “Don’t forget your keys,” Clem reminded her as she darted back out the door. When she was gone, the rest of my team dropped their holographic faces, too, and I’d never been so happy to see their faces.

  “Good to see you guys again,” I said, smiling around at them.

  “This is all so weird,” Clem said, sinking down onto the lone couch and slumping his shoulders. “Did you hear that shit in that air car or whatever it was?”

  “It can’t be called an air car,” Kinley pointed out. “It wasn’t flying.”

  “Yeah, like I said, whatever,” Clem said dismissively. “So did you hear it?”

  “Yeah, I heard it,” I said. “We all did.”

  “What’s the Great Binding War or whatever it was that guy said?” Kira asked, looking between Clem and me. “Do you guys know anything about that?”

  “No, nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “It sounded just as foreign to me as it did to you, I imagine.”

  “Yeah, I got nothing,” Clem groaned, digging himself deeper into the couch cushions. “God, is it weird I feel kind of sick being back on dry land?”

  “Land sick,” Kira giggled. “That’s a new one.” We all laughed.

  “Okay, let me see what I can find,” Malthe said, crossing over to the small desk in the corner and pulling open the computer. “It’s so small. Our stuff is way bulkier than this.” He ran his hands over the thin contraption.

  “Just see what you can find,” I said, counting off all the strange words I’d heard today in my mind. “We need to look up this reality show or whatever it is about us, Achilles, the Great Binding War, binders in general, Termina in general. We might as well look ourselves up while we’re at it, along with these places called the Nether and Direfall. Then we need to figure out where we are now, while we’re at it.”

  “Already on it,” Malthe said, tapping away on the computer’s keyboard.

  “You already figured out how to use that thing?” Cindra asked, looking almost impressed in spite of herself.

  “It’s not all that different from ours,” he shrugged as he continued to tap away on the keys. “It just kind of… different. Like an off-brand product or something.”

  “Or we’re the off-brand,” Clem said darkly. “That driver seemed to think so, at least.”

  “Yeah,” Kinley scoffed. “Here we thought that the entire world revered us, that everyone looked to us as an example of what life should be like. And in reality, they just look to us to laugh at us.”

  “Yeah, that’s… not a happy thought,” I admitted, taking a seat on the couch next to Clem. “I mean, I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this
.”

  “You can say that again,” Clem said, giving a hard, humorless laugh.

  Then there was a tap on the door, and we all just about jumped out of our skins again. I reached for my bracelet to turn back to my disguised self, but then Lin spoke through the door.

  “It’s me,” she whispered. “I have clothes and food.” Then she came in, closing the door quickly behind her, carrying a box full of clothing and what looked to be several pizza boxes to boot.

  “Oh, food,” Clem cried, rubbing his stomach and suddenly not looking so tired anymore. “I’d almost forgotten about food!”

  “You’d almost forgotten about food?” I repeated, giving him a bemused look. “You’re you.”

  “I know, I know.” He swatted at my arm playfully before turning his attention back to the pizza boxes. “Gimme.”

  Lin handed them over, and we set them out on the nearby coffee table. They were smaller slices than I was used to, rectangular when the ones in Termina were triangular, but I gobbled them up, anyway.

  “Damn,” Clem said after he scarfed down half a pizza by himself. “I didn’t realize how much I missed real food.”

  “I thought you said mine was so amazing,” Cindra reminded him.

  “Yeah, well, it was,” he said, “but this is hot. And you don’t have to make it hot yourself.” She smiled and grabbed some for herself.

  And it was damn good, too, better than I would’ve expected. It wasn’t like what I was used to, but it wasn’t any worse for it.

  “So, what did you find us to wear?” I asked after I’d scarfed down a fair amount of the pizza myself, turning back to Lin.

  “A bunch of stuff with the motel’s logo on it,” she said with a disdainful look on her face. “But it’s better than what we’ve got, anyway.”

  “You can say that again,” Kira said, sniffing her jacket with great distaste for the umpteenth time.

  “How’re we doing, Malthe?” I asked the hacker who barely seemed to have even registered Lin’s return since he was so absorbed in the computer. “There’s food, you know.”

  “I don’t have any time for food,” he said dismissively. “I’m absorbing all this information. And there’s a lot of it.”