by D. N. Bryn
A shudder runs through her. She holds the bowl to her lips, taking a tiny sip. Her cheeks pinch, but she slowly drinks more before waving for Xera’s attention. “This is good. I hope I don’t throw it up on your floor.”
Xera shoots to their feet. “I will bring a, uh, bucket.”
Thais’s chest rumbles and she holds out a hand. “Later, later. I’m fine right now.”
Their brow tightens, but they sit back down. “What, um.” They circle their hands between all of us. “What is this?”
I have no idea what that means, but Fern translates the question from Xera language into less vague terms: “What are you and the boat human planning to do?”
“Thais. My name is Thais, like the beginning of taunt and the funny ice from—”
“Don’t care, boatie,” Fern cuts in. “Didn’t your rock-headed friend not tell you that boiuna don’t do ridiculous things like sounds?”
My lips tug up. “I did, she’s just stubborn.”
Thais looks at Xera. “Are all of them like this?”
They shake their head so hard their beads jangle. “About that, though. When are you leaving? Not—not that I need you to go—you seem like you really need help, and if, um, if I can help, I’d like to—but you shouldn’t stay past morning. They’ll start looking then. In houses.”
“We’ll be gone before the mist clears,” I reply, glancing out into the fog-veiled night. We need a canoe, but the more I bring Fern and Xera into our plans, the more chances they might decide to turn on us.
“Are, uh, are there more boat humans chasing you?” Xera asks. “Other than the ones that, um, crashed, I mean.”
Fern looks at Thais, and Thais looks at me, and I drop my eyes to the center of the table, rubbing my ignit to soothe the tingle in the back of my skull.
“There’s really more of them?” Fern swings her hands so hard her bone bracelets rattle. “Dredges, I’m good.”
Xera’s throat vibrates and they cover their mouth.
“You didn’t know?” I ask Fern.
She shrugs. “I told the council what I figured would make them leave but couldn’t be traced back to me as a lie. But this is better! I’m still hiding in thin fog after the weavers kicked me out.”
“This is not better,” Xera protests. “Boat humans are bad for us. I mean, not Thais—Thais isn’t bad—but others, probably.”
Fern’s motions soften. “No, I know. You’re right, Xera.”
Thais sets down her half-drank soup. “These boat humans just want Cacao and me, but I doubt any of them will find us here. It’s amazing the two on our tail lasted that long. If the cartel is attacked by the village warriors, I think Rubem will back them off. I doubt he’s all that interested in fighting anyone in the Murk.”
“Then we’re safe?” Fern sticks her tongue at me as though daring me to lie.
“Unless you put out ‘Hey, cartel humans, come get your poisoned prisoner and a boiuna here’ signs?”
“Nah. They say, ‘poisoned prisoner and idiot thief.’”
“Fuck off.”
A pleasant stillness falls over the table.
With a cringe, Thais picks up her bowl and sips the rest of her soup down. “What was that one sign, the—” She repeats what I assume is meant to be the motion for a weaver, sloppy and wrong both times she makes it.
I show her the proper version, a motion that mimics plaiting but formed near the side of the head. “A weaver is a storyteller who memorizes and reenacts the legends we pass down through the generations. Each village has one or two, but they all meet and train in the northern village of Endless Shadow.”
“I joined them because I wanted to create new stories,” Fern explains. “But I kept making the old ones better, too, and the master weavers didn’t love that particularly.”
“You tried to convince Cupuaçu that the tale of the first mist started with a skeleton war,” Xera adds with their small gentle signs.
“Maybe it did! It’s not a lie if you can’t disprove it.”
Thais’s face pinches up. “Skeleton war?”
“Oh, yeah. But to truly tell the tale, we must start from the beginning.” Fern bares every one of her teeth, rising up over her tail with her arms spread wide, like the most malevolent storytelling actor to ever live.
As she launches into a tale of woe and living bones and spontaneous jokes, I slip back toward the pillows, sprawling out along them. I stare at the ceiling, letting Fern’s story become a distant wave of arms and an occasional tingle along my head ridges. My eyes slip shut for a moment. When I open them, I find Xera leaning over me, staring.
They stumble back, holding their hands to their chest. “Sorry, sorry.”
I stretch my lips into something almost a grin and almost the moment before a strike. “What were you looking at?”
“Um.” Xera’s fingers tangle together before they manage, “Y-you. Looking at you.”
“I got that, yeah. Why were you looking at me?”
“That stone.” They point, their finger hovering in, nearly tapping the wiring cover of a tiny veined rock on my necklace, the elaborately wrapped metal keeping it from touching the other stones. A fissure down the middle reveals a glimmer of color that isn’t color, a rainbow that’s only there if you don’t look at it.
I lift my hand to the necklace, blocking their view of the rock. “What about it?”
“I have one.”
“Cracked open? There’s a spectral fissure exposed in it?”
Xera nods.
“And you never took it to the mechanics?”
“It’s pretty.”
I like Xera a lot more suddenly. “It’s called an eruptstone. It makes active ignits explode.” Not that I would ever destroy a perfectly good ignit with it. “Bigger the ignit or the eruptstone, bigger the boom. No one knows why, and nothing is ever left in the places the flash touches, like everything there’s been disintegrated straight out of existence, but beyond that blast radius, nothing’s affected, like the energy is reflected back in on itself. It’s brilliant. Metaphorically, anyway. Wouldn’t want to see one actually go off.”
Xera’s brow shoots up. I think that means they never knew, but they say nothing. They glance over their shoulder, toward the table, but look back so fast I might have imagined it. “Fern says you are not a, uh, not great person.”
“Fern’s right.” I coil my tail beneath my back, propping up my shoulders like a lounging seat. “But Thais is a great person, mostly, so you shouldn’t kick us out for her sake.” With that, I close my eyes again. I sense no vibrations from Xera, no sign of their leather-soled feet along the wood, but a brush of skin against my arm jerks me back to life, sending awful shudders through my bones. Yanking my tail farther under me, I sit up and rub my ignit.
Xera crouches at my side, their dark irises shadowed by sloping lids and a thick line of black makeup. “Maybe you’re both wrong.” They sign the words like a pair of twisting butterflies that scatter into the forest. Their hair rushes in a wave behind them as they seem almost to fly out of the room.
My brain needs a kick in the gears to start up again once they vanish. I shake my head. Strange cryptic human. I respect that. But their stillness sends a shiver down my spine. It reminds me of Rubem. Nothing else about Rubem and Xera seems the least bit similar except that creeping quiet, as though both of them are wary predators, always on the lookout, always ready to flee or give chase. What sort of a life is that, to be so cautious of attack at all times?
Once Fern wraps up her story, Thais wanders along the edge of the room. She pokes at the desk and moves the cluttered painting supplies off the phonograph. Her nails click as she taps them against its flower-shaped sound horn. After digging through the drawers and a nearby trunk, she finds a sleeve with a large flat disk and sets it on the record player’s box. She searches for something—a crank, maybe. Her hands drop to her hips, and her lips bunch.
I wave at her. “It needs a blue ignit, either small or midsize
d.”
Xera appears beside the desk, leaning against the wall as though they’ve been standing there since the beginning of time. “I don’t have it. I mean, not anymore. Music was mostly important to Father, and he died.”
The lines of Thais’s face droop. As if they’re three heads of the same hungry monster, Thais, Xera, and Fern all turn toward me. My bones crinkle under their gazes, and I clutch my ignit. I scowl. Thais looks away first, her shoulders slumping.
“It’s fine,” she says. “The reader is probably dusty by now anyway.”
Releasing a gust of air through my teeth, I yank off my ignit and wave it in Xera’s direction. “You have a transitioner?”
After a moment of staring at my one-handed signs, they slip a little box out of a pouch in their belt and flip open the top. The wiring beneath produces a spark that will activate an ignit, while another set of wires exposed on the bottom can dampen the power and return it to its inactive state. A weakly pulsing red glow illuminates its inner mechanisms.
I rub my thumb over the back of my own ignit. I don’t need Xera’s tiny red one too. I don’t, because I’ll have more and far larger ones when I receive Thais’s hoard.
Giving my ignit one last caress, I hand it up to Xera. “Don’t get any big ideas,” I grumble. “It’s still mine.”
Xera takes it without comment, plucking it from my fingers with their leather hand protector, veins of a protective metallic substance running through the glove. They hold it to the lighter. A spark shoots through the stone, brightening the glow until it shines like one of the colorful lamps. The force inside it grows as well. The air sweeps away from it, the furniture rattling, Xera’s hair flying out behind them. They wrap it quickly in a cloth woven from their glove’s protective metal and hand it back. Its vibrations still stir a steady breeze and send trembles up my arm and tingles along my head ridges, but the cloth quiets its earth-quaking effect and keeps it from tearing into my scales.
I open a compartment in the phonograph’s side and press the ignit into the empty coils, where the layers of dampening and receiving metals quickly direct all the ignit’s power to one side. With the tap of a switch, it starts to spin in a circle. It blurs into a happy blue ring of light, and the phonograph’s disk moves. Thais’s eyes light up. The sound rolls over me in soft vibrations, creating a subtle beat in my head even though I can’t hear the words or instruments.
Thais grabs Xera’s wrist as they pass. Their brow lifts, their body going rigid, but Thais waits for their permission before pressing their palm to the side of the great metal speaker. Slowly they relax.
“You feel that beat?” she asks.
The corners of Xera’s lips tug and they nod. When they slink away to sit with Fern, they move with a little more ease than before. Fern takes their hands and pulls them into the loose coils of her tail, but she pauses to wave me aggressively toward the phonograph. Toward Thais.
“Mind your own business,” I snap back. Yet my muscles strain without my asking, sliding me up to Thais. Traitorous body. A flare of warm desire traces the space her hands touched when she tried to move me to her rhythm back on the fan boat.
I almost turn around, but she notices me and grabs my arm. She tugs, but I draw away. My tail knocks the back of her knees as I do. A soft vibration wobbles up her throat. She stumbles into me, catching herself on my chest.
A rush of warm nerves spreads along my scales, and a grin infects my face. I wiggle my fingers between us. “How clumsy, ignit eyes.”
“Oh, you—you sneaky little tormenter!” But Thais remains so wonderfully close, staring up at me, her lovely haunting irises bright with blue fire. The moment I rip my gaze from hers, her hands move again, snatching back my attention as though she’s saving my life in the quietest moments. “Could a clumsy boatie do this?” Her whole body sways, serpentine and fluid, then pops like a firecracker, her hands twirling out near her sides.
I swallow hard, following the roll of her waist in her loose fabric, down to her hips, along her legs, to the little jut of her twirling ankle, and back up again. Each motion sets a fire deep inside me, somewhere I had forgotten even to look since leaving the Murk. I lean my face into her hair, breathing in and out in time with her dancing, her rain-cleansed scent filling me like a fresh beginning. I could be anything in this moment. I could steal the world or I could give it away.
“Not a clumsy boatie, then,” I say. “A clumsy serpent.”
“You’re one to talk!” Thais’s chest trembles in a laugh. “What are these? Hips? You move them like a flailing palm branch.” Her fingers drift toward my waist, but she pauses, her face pinching.
Last time, I jerked away, and she clearly hasn’t forgotten that. Neither have I, for very different reasons. Reasons that haunt my scales like a hunger. Casually, like I overestimated a twist of my tail, I slide my body into her grasp. “Time to shut up,” I tease. Then I loop my arms over her shoulders.
Thais closes her eyes, and I don’t need to read her expression to sense the joy sweeping off her, clouding my mind and warming my chest and coursing through my veins, a blissful poison I can’t fight. She runs her hands along my scales, one tracing up my side and the other drawing down to my hips, making me sway to her beat, to her life. I let her. I let her gentle fingers strangle me from the inside out.
My own hands filter into her hair, twisting carefully through the soft waves, brushing the frizzy bits into silk. I follow the lines of her silly human earlobes and her jaw and neck, caressing her tender skin. Such stupidly tender skin. If Thais is a fucking hero, I’m far less decent, far viler, yet I suddenly yearn to protect this ridiculous breakable champion. My body has its own desires, too, the thought of my lips on Thais’s skin and my hips pressed against hers burning through me, bright and eager.
She leans closer.
Her toes slip over the tip of my tail. She pulls away, her eyes springing open like I jolted her out of a daze. She taps her chest to signify herself, but her hand lingers at her chest, her sentence falling to pieces.
“Hey, dancers!” Fern waves at us from the cushions. Xera lies in her coils, a blanket folded around them and a pillow tucked between their arms. “We shouldn’t play that music for too long. There’s another house three trees over, and they’ll wonder what’s going on after a while.”
Thais nods, scrambling to turn off the record player.
And like that, the beauty of the evening vanishes into a droopy melancholy. I retrieve my ignit with the cloth and use the transitioner to deactivate it. My scales tingle as I slip it back onto my necklace, and my fingers knock numbly together. Thais wraps her arms around a bowl Xera must have brought out in case she has to heave again, looking everywhere but at me.
Well. That was that, then, I guess. Everything and nothing.
I flop across some pillows and poke Thais with my tail. “Come sleep, ignit eyes. You need it.”
Grumbling something in her verbal tongue, she crawls over me, purposefully stepping on every bit of my tail she can. I wiggle, shoving her shoulder when she pokes her knee into my stomach.
“Hey, hey, fuck off with you, taunt ice,” I say, mocking the silly way she tries to describe the sounds of her name.
She catches my hands and pins them to the cushion at my side, lying on them. “Your turn to shut up, chocolate bean.”
I flick my tongue at her, tapping it against the bridge of her nose. She smells lovely. She is lovely—here, in the stillness, the passion that beats through her entire being reverberates on some subconscious level. When I tug my hands from under her, I leave them lying between us. I drift off to the faint scent of a fading rain.
Thais wakes three times during the night. Her first spasm empties her stomach again, creating such a stir that Xera rises to clean the bowl for her. Her second returns to bile. By the third, the only thing that leaves her are her tears as her body shakes.
She doesn’t look to me for comfort, and I don’t offer it, but I hold her hair back and wrap a blanke
t over her shoulders when she finishes. I can’t recall how many spasms she had while at the river town. This feels like too many, though, and Thais weakens with each cycle, the slump of her shoulders building like a chain around my own.
I wonder if she would tell me her ignit hoard’s location so I can retrieve the stone for her and return with it. I don’t ask, not because I worry over what she will say, but because I feel the draw in my chest every time I glance at the belt pouch where Xera keeps their tiny red ignit. And that scares me. If I went to Thais’s hoard alone, would I ever come back for her?
ELEVEN
That Which Goes Boom in the Night
Life is like an explosion.
It gives and then it takes away,
and somehow makes both those processes
really,
really suck.
I AWAKEN TO A glimmer of red against the mist. With everything cloaked in shadow, this single hint of light traces the large living space, rimming the table and desk in a faint red sheen and turning the hallway behind us into an open maw. My hazy mind thinks first of a red dawn, but the color comes from below, not above. Like lanterns.
I slip out of the cushions, careful not to wake Thais as I wiggle my tail from under her head. She rolls over, her throat rumbling, but her eyes stay closed. A stray slip of hair blows away from her lips, then slides into her mouth. Gently, I brush it behind her ear.
Something vibrates below the house: a stomp, then a sharp cry. Leaving Thais to sleep, I slide to the far window. Through the mist shines the glow of red-glass lanterns held by two humans perched on the tree’s massive roots a few stories down. One carries a device with what looks like it might be a compass. The soft lantern light illuminates their fishnet-gloved hands.
Rubem.
The cartel leader nods and offers his bearded companion the compass. His entire body wavers like fabric in the wind, his feet slipping. The other human catches him by one arm. Rubem steadies himself with both hands. He signs, and the bearded human replies, their words blurred by the mist and muddled from the mixture of my odd vantage point and the lanterns they still carry. I decipher just enough to put a few sentences together.