Once Stolen

by D. N. Bryn

  “Then we find his boat, break in, and take the compass.” If I can steal a few of his ignits in the process, then all the better.

  Xera nods. “I can track him.”

  “Why should we help them, Xera?” Fern lunges out of her branch in annoyance, grabbing hold of the trunk to bare her teeth at the other Murkling. “Our homes are destroyed because of these two. Isn’t that enough sacrifice for one day?”

  For all of Xera’s flightiness, they hardly flinch at the sight of Fern’s outrage. Instead, they touch their forehead to hers and ask, small but confident, “Is there a limit to how much good one should do?”

  The question makes Fern’s mouth snap closed. She leans against the trunk, her face pinched and her scent name clouded with bitter annoyance.

  Thais takes this as her cue to interject. “We don’t need you guys. We can do it on our own. We’ve—”

  “Got this?” I finish. “We don’t got this. You’ve got poison running through your body, and I’ve got a host of elders who would strangle me if they caught me, and a crazy cartel leader is after us both. We need help.” Xera sacrificed their tree for me. I live because that ignit exploded and a colossal mangrove fell, and I’m sure as fuck not dying yet, not if I can help it. Determination burns in my core like a tiny heat ignit. I’ll have that hoard and my own hide and Thais’s life. All of it. I look to Fern and Xera, meeting their gazes as long as I can bear. “If you stick with us until we’re out of the Murk, you can have something in return. Not ignits, something else.”

  “I want your bones,” Fern replies.

  Thais’s brow shoots up. “What?”

  “When you die,” Fern explains, each motion calm and controlled, “whenever that happens, this week or in five or fifty decades, if I can get to your corpse, I want your bones.”

  I tip my head at her. “Deal.”

  “Hey—” Thais protests.

  I poke her with the end of my tail, spearing it into her stomach. She shoos me away, muttering something in her spoken language. I look at Xera next.

  They fidget. “May I, uh, choose what I want later?”

  “Whatever.” I lie back along the branch, propping my head on my tail so I can still see the others. “Because the ignits are too hard to track while inactive—not producing energy—we should be safe until Thais’s next spasm.” A leaf lands on my nose. I pick it up, flicking it away. “I guess this is where people usually make plans or something.”

  “You guess?” Thais swings her arms as she signs it. “This is why you went to trial so many times, you catastrophic mess of whimsy.”

  “Things worked out, mostly. More than they didn’t. I wasn’t a total disaster.”

  “A hurricane is less disastrous than you.”

  I sit up in a burst, sliding toward her until I hover in front of her face, my teeth bared, my tail curled beneath me. She smells fresh and light and a tiny bit electric. “Say that to my face, why don’t you.”

  “You,” she pokes me in the chest, “are a scaly hurricane.”

  I clutch her fingers, pulling her forward. Her chest vibrates in a noise of surprise, but I catch her in my coils just before she can fall, curling around her tightly and burying my chin in her neck. My signs form stunted and off to the side but every bit as authentic as usual. “I am that exactly.”

  With her arms against my chest, she rumbles in her vocal language, laughing or scolding or both. She relaxes against me, and a peaceful scent slips from her, filling me up. I could almost kiss her neck. If I were braver. If I thought this moment could carry us anywhere.

  It hits me then like a slap in the face: even if Thais lives, we won’t have this much longer together. I’ll take her hoard and flee somewhere safe with it, toward the inland rivers maybe, and she’ll go back to performing for the village people. The deadline for reaching the ignit hoard is also the deadline to my time with Thais. And I selfishly want to make the journey take every day possible, to keep Thais near me as long as I can, to feel her fingers trace my scales and her gentle sigh against my chest one more time.

  I really am a scaly hurricane, a selfish one too.

  Fern hovers above me. “I’m more than happy to get your bones by sitting around here until you turn into a skeleton, but I’ll be hungry again in a few days, so I’d prefer to get this over with. Possibly eat this Rubem person along the way.”

  Thais wiggles in my grip. Grudgingly, I loosen myself, letting her pull her hands up to sign.

  “We don’t kill people unless we absolutely have to,” Thais says, each hand motion fiercer than the last.

  Fern bares her teeth, the branch trembling as she strangles it. “He’s the only one left I can blame for crushing my pool. I will eat him if I damn well please.”

  “You—you—” Thais pokes her finger at Fern’s chest. In the end, she settles on, “You damn boiuna.”

  I nudge Thais in the sides. “Hey, hey, don’t be speciesist! I, for one, try not to eat too many humans. The adults make my throat hurt, and it feels like a weight in my stomach for weeks.” The pinched expression Thais gets means little to me, but I know her well enough to follow up with, “And no, I don’t eat children. That kind of horror is reserved for savages, like fishers and sirens.”

  A rush of tense sadness leaves Thais, clouding all my other senses until the gentle wind carries it away.

  I brush my palms up and down her shoulders a few times, absentmindedly. “We’ll worry about killing and eating later, though. Right now, we just need to find Rubem. When his companion took the device away, they went east. We can start looking there. He must have at least a few boats, so someone would have noticed them go by.”

  “You should stay out of sight,” Xera says, pointing at me and Thais.

  “No way. We’re help—”

  I gently probe for her to stop and circle my arms over her shoulders, snuggling against her back. “We’ll travel with you a ways, but we’ll stay very out of sight. When you find the boats, come back, and we’ll all go attack together, with one of those plan things. To make Thais happy.”

  “Useless muck-mouthed leech.” Thais sighs a great heaving gust of air and goes limp against my chest, her head tipping backward onto my shoulder. Relaxed as she is, with her warmth pressed against me and her scent in my lungs, I almost want to stay like this, to let Fern and Xera do all the work for us. But Rubem might have more ignits.

  As I detangle myself from Thais, she signs a grumbly “You’re terrible” at me.

  I reply in haste. “You, too, ignit eyes.”

  She smiles, and I stare into her shining blue irises, just for a moment, until the vibrations of a distant shout interrupt me. In the stillness of our small group, the rumblings of a much larger crowd sifting through the trees nearer the village’s heart finally come through. A crowd looking for us, or the cartel, or both.

  Fern unhooks and rehooks her jaw as she puts my worries into words. “Someone must’ve realized it was more than just a freak fire.”

  “We should start moving.” Xera’s hands tremble once, quiet and small. They set off back into the canopy.

  Thais follows. I trace my necklace stones one by one, slipping after her. The mists linger between thick roots and on still pools, but most of it has faded, the world giving way to the hazy grey and green light that filters through the thick foliage above. The distant whiff of smoke comes and goes, but even when we near Xera’s old tree to retrieve their little canoe, we see no new damage or flames. Uncontrolled mangrove fires can be terrible monsters. The villagers did well to extinguish this one quickly.

  We row the canoe past the place where Rubem’s boats must have come through, since it’s the only wide enough rivulet on this side of the village. Fern trails behind to watch for village tracking parties while Xera scouts ahead, the canoe tucked into the foliage to keep it out of sight.

  I lie in the lower branches of the canopy, the lazy green water far beneath. A pair of dragonflies the length of my arm sweep along the surface, and the
leaves vibrate to my left as a flock of parrots hop through them. This close to a town, there would be days when a few hoatzi children and a human teenager playfully catch the parrots, maybe a small boiuna looped around one of their shoulders, clinging to their hair and grinning. In my forebearer’s youth, a little pink botos might have swum below them, whistling and clicking in tune with the birds. But there have been only two baby botos this decade, both raised in the safety of the centermost village.

  Still, this is home.

  Was home. My gut hurts. If I can’t live here, in the place I was born and raised, a place I love dearly, then these cartel humans most certainly aren’t allowed, especially those as unwelcome and aggressive as Rubem’s.

  I run my fingers over my ignit, slipping it out of the wires so I can roll it around in my palm. The veins shimmer as though a thousand stars run through them, threaded by streaks of glowing indigos and sapphires and azures. Its gentle heartbeat fills me, soft and soothing.

  Thais shifts at my side, brushing her fingers against mine. I freeze, but then I open my palm to her. She touches the ignit, narrowing her eyes. Pulling her hand back, she taps her fingers on the branch, her beat a little faster and more anxious than normal.

  “Where did you live, before you were banished?” she asks. “Did you have a pool like Fern’s?”

  Her question surprises me. I press my ignit back into my necklace as a dismissal rises in my fingers, but the urge to snap it out never comes. I held it back so many times, and now I can’t, as if the truth has piled up inside me and Thais is the fissure that can finally release it all. “Sort of. For a long time, I had a den beneath a little tree in a northern village. When I first started getting into real properly greedy trouble, I moved through a bunch of places, mostly on the outskirts of the villages that had a high supply of ignits, but some months I’d travel through the Murk, checking the trees that make the ignits—the old ones with parasites in their centers, which we call ancients—for fresh growth.”

  Thais’s eyebrows come together. “Do the Murklings not harvest them?”

  I roll my eyes. “Of course we do, especially now that they’re producing so many. But not like the muck-faced cartels. We have three days once every season when the whole community harvests. Whatever’s found is brought back to the villages and distributed as needed.”

  “No one tries to take the ignits early? Other than annoying hurricanes.” She prods my ribs, sending a little tremble of pain and joy up my side.

  I wiggle, batting at her hand and grinning. “Not anyone who values their life. Most ancients have some nasty guardians—penajuars and the like. And ignits aren’t bought and sold here like you barbaric hagglers do it. If someone stole an ignit and tried to sell it, an elder would eat them, no questions.”

  “And if they used those ignits instead?”

  “That’s a matter for the council. If it’s determined that the distribution wasn’t fair and the thief deserved their ignit, they can keep it, and the distribution itself is put under trial instead, to weed out any who might be working against the betterment of the whole. If they didn’t deserve the ignit they took, they must return it, along with any others they may have.”

  Thais stares at me. “Do you not believe that’s a good system?” Her hands wiggle as though she’s searching for the right signs. “You just know it so well, and you say it like it’s the right way to do things, but you don’t follow it.”

  I shrug. “And I never will.” But the question prunes back through the forest of my greed to the very first root. “It’s a good system, but there’s something broken in it too. I need an ignit for the way it thrums. I need one every time I feel the brush of a net or see the bark pop out on a veiny piece of driftwood, or come too near to a tortoise shell. That wasn’t always greed; that was a child whose bones hurt and whose skull itched, who just wanted to feel like everything inside him wasn’t shattering into little pieces all day long. But for all the councils and the elders factored into their distributions, not one bothered with a little boy crying for a pretty stone when there were hunters needing tools and families needing food and whole villages needing light.”

  Thais holds her hands up as though she might reply to that, but after a moment, she only wraps one arm around my back, pulling the other to her chest in the motion for I’m sorry.

  Her touch alights and soothes all at once. I set my chin on her head. “But now I also want them more than everyone else ever will. And I’ll keep hoarding them until I have so many that I can’t possibly lose them again. Ever. I don’t care if a few villages have to go dark to do it.”

  She can’t like that, because she’s Thais, a hero, a good person. A savior. But somehow, I don’t mind that she’s the person she is, with her stupidly pure morals.

  She shakes her head and leans it against my shoulder. Slowly, she rocks us, as if listening to some distant melancholic rhythm. When she finally pulls away, her shoulders bounce a little and her signs grow larger. “You’re telling me things finally, you grumpy ridge-headed hermit.”

  I roll my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, well don’t get too used to it,” I grumble, looping my tail around myself so I can huddle into it. “And my head ridges are damn gorgeous. Some boiuna would kill for these patterns.” I pull that line clean out of my silt-strewn backside. Not a lie, exactly, because it might be true.

  Thais stares at me, and I think she must see straight through the half fib. But she draws one hand over my head, hovering it just above my ridges as though tracing the risen boxes and swirls. With her other hand she signs. “Damn gorgeous.”

  That lights up my heart. I want to be gorgeous to her. “Fucking ignit eyes.” I brush my thumb over my own ignit, not looking at her. But I feel the draw of her haunting rain-cleaned soul through her stare, or maybe through the subtle pulse of her heartbeat in her wrist as it comes so near to my skull that her skin almost touches my scales.

  With her free hand, she signs. “I hate that you kill people.” The statement seems so contrary to her actions, but the whiff I catch from her ties them all together, beautifully sad with melancholic yearning.

  “I don’t always kill them,” I grumble. “Sometimes I don’t use as much pressure for so long and just knock them out. Not lately, but, you know, I could. If I wanted to.”

  “Wait, really?” Thais perks up. She shoves me in the shoulder. “You ridiculous glop!”

  “Hey! I haven’t had a lot of love for intelligent species in a while—blame them, not me.” I stick my tongue out at her for good measure.

  “Ruthless idiot.” But she loops an arm through mine. “How do you do it then—the whole strangling business? So I know how to avoid it in the future.”

  “In case I try to eat you?” The tease earns me a snort.

  “In case one of you Murklings tries to knock me out. Or someone else for that matter.”

  Slipping the end of my tail up, I nudge it threateningly against her neck. Instead of the stiff panicked struggle of those I’ve strangled in the past, Thais loosens her shoulders, nuzzling her nose against my scales. The warmth of her breath spreads through me.

  Gently, I lift her hair away from her skin and tap two fingers to her pulse. “The blood flows to your brain in a vessel along both sides of your neck. If I squeezed hard enough, too little blood will reach your head. First, you’d go unconscious, then you’d die. Somewhere in the middle there, you’d get a nasty case of brain damage.” I slide my tail off her shoulders and encircle it lightly around her middle instead.

  She raps her hands against it a few times. “Could a human or a hoatzi do that too? Do you need a tail, or can you make it work with just hands?”

  “Hands, no. Arms, maybe? I’ve seen human warriors practice it while training. They wrap an arm around the person from behind, elbow down, and squeeze. It’s slower though.” I pause, my gaze on her ever-moving fingers as they continue their incessant rhythm. “You want to try on me? For fun.”

  “Sure.” Thais faces me. Her fingert
ips brush too gently against my neck, sending unpleasant tingles through my spine. When she presses harder, the firm touch eats away at my momentary discomfort. But she draws back. “Well, turn around then.”

  Before I can, her chin snaps toward the canopy. The rustle of branches pricks along my scalp, and I follow her gaze. Only a monkey drops out of the leaves, swinging by us and climbing higher into the trees. When I turn back toward Thais, though, Xera sits on her other side. I startle, rubbing my ignit to soothe the scattered sparks twitching beneath my skin.

  “I, uh, found Rubem’s boat,” Xera says.

  At the same time, Fern pokes out of the water below us, giving a quick wave before signing, “There’s a scouting party a ways back, heading straight for us. If we’re going to do this, we’d better hurry.”

  Stretching out my back, I detangle myself from the branch. “What are we waiting for, then? Let’s give one silt-breathing cartel leader a damn bad morning.”

  THIRTEEN

  The Future is a Geode

  A thief, a coward, a liar, and a hypocrite walk into a boat.

  Only three of them walk out.

  (You thought this was going to be a joke, didn’t you?)

  THE SILT SWIRLS AROUND me. It settles once I do, the occasional coppery fish stirring up a fresh trail of it. I stare up at the shadows of three cartel vessels. One of their two small flat-bottomed fan boats sinks a little deeper into the water, a massive crocodilian tail hanging over its edge. The larger boat sits between them, its hull plunging halfway to the riverbed.

  It possesses no fans or sails or motors, but a twistable device at its back harbors a massive blue ignit, all its wouldbe power directed out one side. The stone lies dormant now, taunting me with its faint glow. I sweep my tail in agitation, stirring up more of the loose bottom dirt and making a catfish dart away in confusion.