Once Stolen

by D. N. Bryn

I bolt upright, half-annoyed and—well, fully annoyed, and not the least bit worried that the poison in her veins might be giving her some kind of spasm again. “It’s true. I just like rocks, okay.”

  “No—I—” She keeps quaking, and it finally hits me that the vibration might be laughter. “I think it’s funny. You say you just like rocks while wearing a rock necklace, playing with a rock, traveling through the Murk to get more rocks. Your entire life revolves around rocks. Of course you would know so much about ignits.”

  “Fuck off, boat shit,” I grumble. “I can love rocks if I want to.”

  “I think it’s nice, Cacao.” She brushes her wiry curls back, tucking her feet beneath her legs. “You have something that means a lot to you. Most people go their entire lives and never find a passion like that.” Her hands lower, and she raps out a rhythm against the center seating block. She repeats it three times before her words finally sink in.

  “You’re the only one who feels that way.”

  Thais pokes me in the shoulder. “Hey now, I never said I approved of your actions. It’s nice—good—that you love something. It’s not nice that your love hurts other people.”

  I roll my eyes. “That’s called greed.”

  Her cheeks puff out and she shakes her head. “Fungus brain.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I grumble. “Hey, did your mom also love rocks?” It stirs my chest to think that there was someone in the world who would have listened to me ramble about how rocks have cycles just like water and replied with a detailed analysis on the formation of geodes.

  “Only the ignits,” Thais replies. “She didn’t care for rocks, just hoarding something powerful and beautiful all to herself, and she only learned as much about them as she needed to make that happen.”

  My imagined connection crumbles. Better luck never.

  Thais slaps the wood twice and pops onto the seat. “So, you think we’re safe here? From Rubem, I mean. He might enter the Murk after us.”

  I lean back, staring at the canopy. “He can’t be that crazy. But he does seem to have some weird deal with the fishers, and they’re definitely crazy enough.” My thoughts wander from there. “I’ll finally move out of his territory once you give me your hoard. I won’t have him and the fishers breathing down my neck for the rest of my life.” The far edge of the Murk butts against another river system under the control of a lesser cartel who goes by some kind of fruit symbol. A banana or a plantain. I could try there.

  Thais’s eyes pierce into me with such intensity that I can barely keep my gaze on her hands because even the peripheral haunt of her irises hurts. “You never plan on living in the Murk again, do you?” she asks, then returns to tapping the wood on either side of her.

  “Are you ever planning to stop that incessant drumming?” I scowl.

  “Nope.” Her shoulders roll like a slithering snake, and she gives three more raps. “I want to create music endlessly, for all my days.”

  It makes a stupid amount of sense. “That’s what you meant, about being a dancer. You’re one of those damn street rumblers.”

  “Street what?” She cocks an eyebrow at me.

  “Street rumblers,” I repeat. “You play your instruments in the streets and create so many vibrations the wood rumbles. It’s annoying.”

  “I do street performances, yes, but also inns and festivals and other things. I was part of a group for a few months, but they didn’t like my objection to the cartels’ tyranny, so I left.” She barely looks at me.

  My hands move before I can think to stop them. “They must have turned your departure into a brand-new holiday.”

  Thais stiffens, but she replies by popping open a compartment in the center seating area. As she digs through it, her hips wiggle to the beat that still echoes through my head. Curiosity gets the better of me. I sit up.

  The compartment holds a few light blankets, spare parts, a rope, and a container of dried meat. Thais’s fingers graze the edge of the food, and her stomach gurgles. With her human eating habits and her last two half-digested meals populating the environment, she must be dying for nourishment, but her lips bunch and she lets the dried meat go. She moves to the blankets, pulling them out, still folded, and setting them to the side. A hand drum lies beneath.

  Thais’s ignit eyes gleam as she grabs it. She sets it between her legs and raps her hands against its taut top. A rumble starts up in her chest and rises into her throat. Her lips move. She sways rhythmically. Her eyes close, long lashes resting against her light brown skin. A spiral of her dark hair slips along her graceful jawline. Her rain-cleaned scent sparks with happiness.

  I rub my necklace in time to her vibrations, moving my shoulders to the beat.

  Thais’s snaps her eyes open, haunting, terrible, beautiful. She blinks. “You can dance?”

  I realize how long I’ve been staring. A rush of heat sweeps over me, and I glare at the deck instead. I never disliked dancing until this moment, but suddenly my annoyance burns like a torch in my gut. “No. Dancing is for fools.”

  Thais’s soft smell bursts with something extravagant, and she leans toward me. Her hands find my shoulders and hips, the tips of her fingers nudging my body to a phantom beat as they move. The soft motion comes with the needling pressure that arches through my bones, her touch too light. I jerk away from her. My tail hits the railing, and my torso falls over the edge.

  Water floods up my nostril slits. I yank myself back onto the deck, sputtering and dripping. With a shake of my torso, I scoot a little farther away from Thais. A puddle forms beneath me.

  Her scent vanishes, and her new beat overflows with ungainliness. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—do you not like to be touched?”

  “With all the pulling me around you’ve been doing, if I couldn’t stand physical contact as a whole, I would’ve said something already, boat shit.” The truth sticks to my chest, though, terrifying and horrible. I don’t like that particular touch. I don’t like the shiver it shoves along my ribs or the stupid way I suddenly crave her palms pressed there firmly instead, my side raw and empty where her skin only brushed, as though she ripped off the scales as she removed her hands. I twist away.

  My nose floods, a mess of scents running over me like a shudder. I flick my tongue out. Approaching ridges form in the water as a pair of tails oscillate back and forth below the surface, and two unique boiuna scent names separate themselves.

  SEVEN

  Putting the Past in the Future

  Maybe the curse was actually me.

  Or maybe it was both of us.

  Either way, this sucks.

  I GO STILL, TRYING not to breathe, not to exist. The larger boiuna draws her torso out of the water, revealing herself to be just a bit smaller than I—not small enough to eat. In the moment I meet her irises, they tighten, her name dark and pungent, like the stink of rot. A loop of fungi drapes over her shoulders. The boiuna at her side looks similar enough to be her kin, splashes of deep red blossoming over their dark scales, metallic and bright, sanguine.

  My gaze jumps to the engine. The light of its ignit shines through the open front. Grabbing Thais’s arm, I nudge her toward it. She nods and slips slowly from my grip.

  “We know you, Bittersweet,” Rot signs, her distaste flooding my nose.

  “Funny, because I’ve never met either of you,” I reply, baring my teeth. “I would remember people who stink this damn badly.”

  Sanguine bobs in the water. “We were at your trial.” Their words come with a reflection of my scent name, leaving no doubt they speak of my hearing.

  “So were a lot of people. Get the fuck on with it.” My fingers creep toward the machete as soon as I stop signing.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” they accuse.

  I shrug, pulling my lips back farther. “Where might here be?” But that question just triggers my mind to reply, bouncing the thought like a million black-nosed monkeys: here is home.

  Sanguine only flicks their tongue, swimming around R
ot’s back, their tail twisting into the tree roots.

  But Rot stares me down as though I’m a piece of fresh capybara meat instead of an equal-sized predator. “I’m not the sort to care about your little stunts, but you’re floating by our home with a boat human and one of their disruptive machines, and I won’t go against the elders.” She flings the words with sharp motions and a sharper scent. “Leave the Murk, or they’ll come for you.”

  A chill settles over me despite the muggy afternoon air. This is real. Someone here will try to kill me.

  Not Rot or Sanguine, but the elders for certain, if not a band of hunters or a mob. My fingers flick to the ignit Thais pressed into my hand last night. “Then I die.” I sign the commitment, small, one-handed. Next week, either I’ll lie on a hoard of ignits or the Murk fish will swim circles through my skull.

  The boat’s fan whirls to life, and we shoot forward, clunking over Rot’s tail as we fly along the rivulet, Thais steering us through the tight bends between the trees. We soon pass out of Rot’s range, the boat too fast for a boiuna her size to keep up. But the movement takes us deeper into the Murk, closer to the elders and all the other terrible dangers this place holds.

  Thais tries to catch my attention with her hands. I ignore her in favor of our surroundings, watching for other boiuna. Thais’s distraction allowed Rot and Sanguine to sneak up. If she would just shut up, maybe we can make it through this place in one piece. But Thais being wordless or still—the rains forbid, both at once—might never happen, even in death.

  Her stare nearly bores a hole in the back of my head, and when the fan cuts out again, she scrambles across the boat, plopping onto the railing so near that I can’t ignore her flinging signs. “What was that, you insolent self-loathing bug?” She jabs her finger at me accusingly. “Explain!”

  With her bastardized boat language and utter inability to smell, she must have missed pieces of the conversation. I shrug. “They want me gone.”

  “From their territory?” Somehow, Thais leans closer.

  I scoot away. “Boiuna don’t have territories, we aren’t sirens or some muck. We have individual central dwellings, and from there we go wherever we like.”

  “Then from what—the Murk? They want you gone from the Murk?” Her motions rage like a storm. “That’s why you left it? They kicked you out?”

  “Hard to kick when you have no legs.”

  She reeks of something so frustrated and determined that I concede.

  “Banishment.” I touch my ignit, sliding my thumb smoothly though the worn grooves, before adding, “The elders banished me for the crime of being an absolute pile of garbage.”

  Thais stares at me. “What did you do, Cacao?”

  “Fucked some muck up, mostly.” Rattling from above draws my gaze, but I see nothing through the leaves. “I’m a greedy insolent bottom dweller, like you’re so very fond of proclaiming. Honestly, I would’ve thought you’d figured it out already.”

  The smell of Thais’s anger fades. She slumps onto the deck, rapping her nails in quick succession. “What will they do if they catch you here?”

  “I don’t know.” The lie slips easily through my fingers. I don’t know if they’ll manage to kill me. I might escape dramatically in the middle of my trial.

  “They banished you already,” Thais says, as though I need a reminder. “You boiuna don’t happen to have some funky root prisons somewhere? Are your elders known for granting second chances?”

  “Banishment was my second chance. Or fifth, if you count the lesser council meetings.”

  “No more chances, then,” Thais concludes. She blows air through her lips. Her haunting eyes go as cloudy as the midnight mist. “What’s your plan to avoid them? How can I help?”

  I grin, but my fingers curl tightly around my ignit, refusing to let go when I sign a one-handed, “Plan? I don’t know that word.”

  “It’s like a strategy you create to—” Her gaze narrows, and she whacks me in the shoulder with one of the folded blankets. “Cacao, you treacherous child of a tapir! You haven’t even made a plan?”

  “I made a plan! The plan is to go through the Murk without dying, get a ton of lovely ignits, and be happy forever.” The last part sits in my heart like a weight.

  When Thais draws a breath, her chest vibrates once, and she presses her hands to both sides of her snobby nose, watching me. “Well, then that’s where I’m going to get you!” She pulls her thumbs across her fingertips, making a sharp vibration with them. “Are there routes we can take that are less likely to run us into these elders? What if we travel at night instead? Boiuna have those scent names, right? If we load our boat with things that smell strongly—”

  “If you expect me to burn out my nose for this, I’d rather die first,” I grumble.

  “—then we could—”

  But the purr of a downriver boat fan flares along my head ridges, and I grab her hands. “Boats coming!” I sign, scrambling toward our silent engine. The red ignit holds a glow so weak I can only see it when I cup my hands around its casing. We’re dead in the water.

  Thais wheels around and yanks a long simple pushing rod off its railing hooks. The full wooden pole towers over her head, but she spins it and shoves the edge against the nearest root. Her muscles bulge, and the boat drifts ever so slowly away from the root.

  “Good try, weakling. Now do that another three thousand times in the next thirty seconds.”

  “Why don’t you get off your scaly haunches and help me?”

  Even with my strength, we’re nowhere near the next break in the rivulets, and the boat—two boats now—approach fast, a blur of them visible through the distant trees. “We fight and hope we can kill them all?”

  “Cacao!”

  “Right, fine, those are bad odds anyway.” I scowl. “If our ignit can’t carry us anywhere, then we steal theirs.” Stealing ignits is the only thing I’m useful for anyway. Though useful might not be the right term, considering how many times I’ve been caught.

  “Well, go on, then!” Thais picks up my tail and dumps it into the river.

  But this time I anticipate her jostling, and I bunch up my muscles around my hips to keep from sliding after it. “What about you?” The question bubbles up from some strange place in my chest, filling the space of the approaching boats, lingering there like a palpable danger.

  “I’m fine, you silly fool.”

  “Hey, hey, don’t be rude. Soft insults are bad for my health!” I roll over the edge of the boat and slip beneath the surface before she can form a snappy reply.

  The water wraps around me, dense with flecks of greens and greys. The brown silt coating the bottom lifts in swirling clouds as a catfish meanders along it, smaller fish darting out of its way. The lairs beneath the tree roots create their own little worlds. Pumping fins and paws and flippers tickle my head ridges while ripples churn the world above.

  I sink until I blend with the shadows, letting the haunting rhythms of the Murk fill me up, soothing my soul. This is home. This was home.

  The first boat nears, a clear symbol of the cartel painted on its side, but when the second stalks around the bend after it, my gut twists. This one’s dark wood projects a daunting shadow. A blaze of orange hair rides above it. My skin crawls at the thought of the fisher’s nets, and I sink a little deeper into the water, focusing on the gentle thrum of my ignit where it slides like a heartbeat along my collarbone.

  As the cartel boat nears our stolen one, it slows. Down the river, the fisher boat mimics it, slipping along the far edge of the trees like they anticipate a trap. All the better for me.

  Shimmers of silver catch deep within the translucent grey rock as I draw it off my necklace. I swim beneath the cartel’s stopped boat and come up on the side farthest from the fishers. The humans’ feet vibrate the wood toward the front, so I slip around the back, peeking over the railing. Both the driver and the crewmate hover as near to Thais’s boat as they can, weapons drawn. She must have ducked behi
nd the center seats, because I don’t see her anymore.

  I sneak over the railing and pop open the engine. Their ignit glows at half power, about the same size as the one on our boat and just as gloriously beautiful. My fingers twitch to grab it, but the still-active rock radiates the kind of heat even my scales would be unhappy with, and I have no time to figure out which of the boat’s switches will deactivate it with a shock of electricity. Instead, I press my clingstone to its edge. The rocks stick together, and when I draw the clingstone back, the activated ignit comes with it.

  Relief rushes through me, but the cartel humans smell none of the scent that comes with it, just as ignorant to my existence as before. Grinning, I slide my torso back toward the water. Before I hit the railing, my ridges spike with the vibration of the fisher’s spear gun. I roll to the side. The tip of the projectile scratches a long burning scrape over my bicep. My grip on the clingstone slips. I grab for the pair of rocks, my mistake registering a moment too late. My fingers brush the activated ignit. Its heat flares against my scales like a wellwarmed pan, so hot I instinctively launch it away.

  It flies at the face of one of the cartel humans. Their delicate flesh sizzles. They shriek and stumble over the middle seating, scrambling for a canteen while the ignit rolls along the wood, leaving an unhappy tingle of brown in its wake.

  The other human turns toward me, machete raised. I lurch at them, my teeth bared. Somewhere in my spinning mind I think up excuses to shout at Thais: Mostly dead isn’t actually murder and If I eat the corpse, it doesn’t count. But as I lunge past the center seating, the distracted human steps into the path of a fisher’s next spear shot. It blooms through their stomach, blood spilling from the wound, then slipping from the corner of their mouth. I jerk away.

  Their companion scrambles to their feet, lifting their pistol. The tip of a pole hits them in the back of the head. They sway, and another smack knocks them into the river. Behind them, Thais leans over the railing of our boat, holding the pushing rod.

  The fisher vessel speeds toward us. With one hand, I attempt to rub my panic into the ignit on my necklace while I snatch my clingstone off the deck with the other. The cartel’s active ignit comes with it. I fling myself into our boat, nearly taking out Thais as I do. Shoving past her, I reach the engine. I press the new ignit to the old one, ripping free a small green sharestone from my necklace and tapping it between them. The red glow moves from one ignit to the other with a flash.