by Brindi Quinn
WHOOOOSH!
Without offering a greeting, the lanky boy hurled something small and silver straight for Theo’s head. Theo caught it with ease and threw Kipper something in return – a smirk that was wider than any I’d seen from him before.
“Gonna have to do better than that one, pal,” Theo said.
The small, silver thing was the loomer, returned to ball form.
For a moment or two – or maybe even three – tension shot between the two boys, like static. We didn’t have time for tension. We didn’t have time for static. And we certainly didn’t have time for rivalry. I was about to tell the pair of them so, when Kipper kicked himself from the pole and began a lazy swagger to where we stood. Still, he didn’t offer a hello, but he flicked his wrist in my direction, and said, “Who’s the girl?” in a voice that was raspy to the point of squeaking.
Theo started, “That’s–”
“I’m Zillow,” I said, content to answer for myself. “Zillow Stone.”
Kipper didn’t say anything. He didn’t react as any normal human would. Instead, he leaned forward, flared his nostrils, and–
If I wasn’t mistaken, I was being sniffed.
“Tsk! Tsk!” Theo tutted. “It’s not polite to smell a girl on the first date, Kip.” He put his hand to the side of his mouth. “Besides, you’ll want to be careful with this one. She’ll neuter you for looking at her the wrong way. My Zill is a strong and powerful Zill.”
Kipper turned his back to us. “She reeks of the city. Must be a newb.” He glanced lazily up at the sky.
“W-well! She is newish. Okay, she’s very new, but that doesn’t mean squat. You should see her in action.”
Kipper ignored him. “So then, what have you and the newb been up to?”
Theo gritted his teeth over being ignored, but recovered quickly. “Not much.” He waved at the air, hoity-toity. “Just retrieved a certain S-class retrect. No biggie.”
Kipper stiffened. “The one in the canyon?”
Ah, now I understood Theo’s quick recovery. This was what the doe-eyed boy had been waiting for. At once, smugness became apparent in all parts of his body, down to his left eyebrow, which perked unusually high. Meanwhile, his mouth curled up evilly at both corners. “That’s the one! It was easy, reall–”
He stopped because my elbow had just broken into his side. Pissing matches were amongst the things we didn’t have time for. The mark on my hand gleamed green in the dusk. My Marker was still out here, on the prowl, and our rematch would come sooner or later. I wanted to gain as much knowledge and experience as I could before then.
Never again would I let him hold back. Next time we fought, it would be all out. And I would leave the arena a victor.
With my elbow pushed into the softness of his side, Theo frowned at me, but asked of Kipper, “Er– how about you?”
Kipper turned around in a flash, eyes afire, mouth wrenched, and suddenly exhibiting smugness similar to – perhaps even greater than – Theo’s. “Just had a showdown with Abby,” he said. “Managed to land a few good hits. She ended up running away. I got pretty close this time, though.”
The statement seemed to tweak Theo in a particular way. I saw a flash of ache roll over his expression before it transformed into nonchalance.
“Abby is Kipper’s Marker,” Theo explained, with a second hoity-toity wave of his hand.
“Yes, and she’s feisty,” said Kipper.
“Not half as feisty as Chloe.”
“Please.” Kipper shook his head. “Chloe’s a petal compared to Abby. Abby could cut a man to shreds if she put her head to it. Did you know that the hide she wears around her wrists was salvaged from an actual wilderboar she killed? That’s crazy! Have you seen one of those things? Their tusks are longer than my arm!”
“Yeah, yeah, Chloe isn’t stupid enough to get caught by one of those things in the first place.” Theo’s left eyebrow was higher than ever. “She spends her time doing, you know, useful stuff. Geomapping . . . Engineering . . .” He glanced at me sideways to see if I was listening.
If he was baiting me for awe, I couldn’t give him any. Instead, I gave him a hearty dose of disbelief. Boasting and gloating? I looked from scruffy boy to lanky boy. The two prags were actually bragging about the qualities of their Markers.
There were things about this game I didn’t understand. And the list was growing steadily.
I prodded Theo in the shoulder before he had a chance to go on. “Why are we here?” I asked. Night would soon be falling and I wanted to prepare for the awakening of my tracker, which was inevitable to come sometime in the following day.
“Yes, why are we here?” said Kipper.
Theo lowered his pack to the ground and withdrew a clear bag filled with blue pills – looking suspiciously like the one he’d given me at the site of the downed crawler. This time, he didn’t offer me any; rather, he extended them to Kipper. “A gift.”
Kipper folded his arms. “Theodorius Biggsburg doesn’t give gifts.”
“An offering, then,” Theo said, looking slightly offended. “IF you do me a teensy, eeensy favor.”
It sounded like something I’d heard before.
“That’s more like it.” Kipper eyed the bag warily. “What favor this time?”
“Simple. Accompany me and Zillabago here to the pit.”
I didn’t know what ‘the pit’ was, but the mention of it did nothing to sway Kipper’s wariness. “And then?” he asked.
Theo shrugged. “Stand guard. Simple, am I right?”
“Deal.” Without waiting for further explanation, Kipper swiped the bag of pills and stuffed them into his shirt pocket. Then he turned on heel, stuck his thumb over his shoulder, and ordered, “Let’s go.”
You wouldn’t hear me complain. Walking was the most productive thing we’d done since meeting Kipper.
The night was warmer than the past nights. Even the ground was warm, as it had been at the sunken plant. The wasteland nights shifted from cool to warm without regard for those who traveled though. I would need to buy more clothing to adjust. Perhaps the next waystation we traveled to would have greater offerings.
We three ventured on, eventually coming to a place that looked more preserved than the rest of the outlands. At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. A sprinkling of white stones sprang from the ground in even lines.
“Gravestones,” Kipper explained.
“Whose?” I asked.
“Fallen prags.”
Fallen prags. Our brethren, mercilessly hunted by the Western demons.
Each stone was without engraving. The fallen Easterners rested below, nameless. Those who failed their markings weren’t worthy of recognition. I wondered if Othello was among them.
“There aren’t very many,” I noted, drawing my eyes to the horizon. “There must be other burial grounds out here.”
Theo nodded in agreement. He, too, drew his attention to the horizon, though it wasn’t because of sentiment. His eyes widened in conspiracy. “You know, dudes, not many bastards ever make it back to the city in one piece. MAYBE there aren’t any other cemeteries. MAYBE this is it.” He began to illustrate his point with wild hand movements. “See, my thinking’s that prag remains aren’t usually together enough to bury.” He shuddered. “If you get me.”
We did, but he couldn’t refrain from adding,
“Mangled.”
“Yeah, yeah, we get it.” Kipper pushed past him. Then, he slid his finger along the top of a grave and proceeded to sniff it, narrowing his eyes shrewdly at the result. Maybe the lanky boy’s sense of smell was more fine-tuned than a normal person’s.
I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust my partner either, to be fair, but of the two, I trusted Theo more.
Afterwards, I stayed at my partner’s side, probing him about this so-called ‘pit.’ Questioning him about Plot 2. Interrogating him about the prag fortress called Paradise, where Peck and the others planned on traveling, and which I reckoned was nothing like the one fr
om my dream. All of this I did, while reading both his and Kipper’s reactions. None of my questions resulted in much, though, and I was beginning to grow moody, when Theodorius finally decided to cooperate. He agreed to mark down all of the known waterwheels and waystations on my map, if I agreed to keep any and all questions to myself until we reached the pit.
It was a start – though I didn’t take kindly to ultimatums.
“These aren’t all of them, mind you,” he said as he scrawled. “Just the ones I’ve heard of. Here–” He circled a few of them, including Zelpha. “These are the ones I’ve ACTUALLY been to. Haven’t verified the others, so your luck’s as good as mine.”
“Let me see.” Kipper snatched the map from Theo, adding a few more circles, and drawing arrows to indicate where Theo’s estimates had been off. Theo grumbled in response. After, they argued about the placement of a particular waystation in the far north, leaving me to study the updated map.
Inconsistencies aside, at least I was better off than I’d been.
At the University, we’d taken classes on orienteering. We’d been dropped in the center of the city, with nothing more than a pencil and pad, and vague instructions on how to reach some statue or billboard on the far border. On these outings, we would map our routes and in the end, compare them to one another’s. Karán had never been good at it, always producing disproportionate maps that resembled the doodles of children, so she’d stick by me, copying my estimations. I didn’t mind, though it was a habit that wouldn’t serve her well in the outlands. Not that I could picture out here, clawing her way through ruin and rock, in the first place.
Then again, she’d never have to. She’d never do any of this this. That was the fate of those who’d skipped their markings.
Neither Kipper nor Theo nor I had been that lucky.
Not that I’d ever necessarily felt unlucky.
I hadn’t had time to even give it thought.
I turned to Theo. “Do you ever feel unlucky?”
“Zill.” Theo looked at me stone-faced. “That’s technically a question. But now that you ask – no, not really. I mean, I ran into you, didn’t I? My mondo badass loner on her first day. That was reeeeally lucky. If I hadn’t found you then, someone else would’ve nabbed you up for shiz! We managed to get that retrect and everything.” He grinned widely – but it was only with his mouth. His doeish eyes were solemn. I attempted to scrutinize him, but he noticed right away and tried to deflect. “Now, no more questions, Zillusion! A master never reveals his secrets all at once!”
A master? I severely doubted that Theo had ever been, or would ever be, a master of anything. But I’d let him have it. He was behaving boldly in the presence of Kipper. The play of boys was foreign to me, having never spent any great length of time around a pair of them before. I’d leave them to their devices and observe their mannerisms, if only to understand Crash’s better.
No, that was probably futile. The Western demons weren’t like us.
They were unholy.
Did that make us holy?
With a sigh, I squeezed the strap of my backpack. Contemplating like this wasn’t bringing me any closer to winning the game.
Welcome to Paradise, Zillow Stone.
That didn’t help either. My Marker’s voice popping into my head, out of nowhere, was a distraction I didn’t welcome.
I found a small piece of wood buried in the dirt and busied myself with whittling the end of it. Before long, I’d made a pipe-like object that served no real use.
“Here.” I tossed it at Theo.
“Uh, thanks?”
I whittled four more before growing bored with it.
As we continued on towards the unknown pit, the two boys continued to bicker. Kipper’s voice rasped in the night, always sounding as if he’d recently been in a shouting match. For all their banter, the pair seemed comfortable together. Maybe they were friends. I couldn’t really tell. Eventually the group became quiet, and Theo fell behind. He fiddled with his pack for a bit but didn’t seem interested in talking to either Kipper or me. When night became deep, I began to notice something across the wasteland. Small green lights glowed here and there. At first I thought them the marks of my fellow prags, but soon realized that they were glowing insects, zipping in the night.
The mark on my hand continued to match them.
But rather than comfort me, it only made me restless.
Chapter 7: The Truth about Theo
The air surrounding the pit was a furnace.
That was because the pit was nothing less than a break in the earth. Hot magma lay in a large pool, the size of the University grounds or bigger, with cavernous sides rising like a basin all around it. The hot liquid within the basin was unnervingly still – a color my eyes had never seen before. It was blindingly red-orange, and not unlike the neon lights found in the more unsavory parts of Eastern City. Over the top of the pool, a bridge-like formation of rock rose, leading from where we stood to the far end of the basin, though there didn’t appear to be any sort of outlet on the other side.
Kipper didn’t need instruction. He dropped his pack at the foot of the bridge and took a squatting position.
Meanwhile, Theo kept on, starting across the rocky structure.
I, however, rooted myself next to Kipper. I could feel the hair of my arms singeing because of the lava’s radiation. Traveling across the bridge, deeper into the lava basin, hardly seemed like a sane decision. “What’s the point of this?” I asked Theo.
But my partner was strange. He didn’t turn around. It had taken almost a full day to get here, during which Kipper and I had had to use misdirecting gambits, and the longer we’d traveled, the less energetic Theo had become.
That was to be expected, I supposed, but . . .
He’d been unusually quiet for the last hour or so.
“You can’t see it,” he started, slowly, “but there’s a cave on the other side of the pit. It’s carved out of the rock over there. There’s something useful inside.” His shoulders tensed. “Help me get it, would you?”
Something was wrong. His body was stiff, his voice empty.
I didn’t believe him.
Instinct told me there was no cave on the other end. Instinct told me this was a trap. I turned to Kipper, but he was already busy patching a hole on the side of his boot. Either he was completely uninterested in Theo’s quest, or he was very, very good at hiding his feelings.
“Come on, Zilluptuous.” Theo was pleading now. “I know YOU of all people can help me get it.”
That was probably true . . . if there even was a cave, let alone something inside of it.
Finally, Theo shot a feeble look over his shoulder. He was forcing a grin, but it didn’t come off well. He looked sort of ill. “This is the last thing, Zill. I promise. Help me out, and I’m all yours. I’ll bring you anywhere. I’ll tell you anything. Fuck, I’ll be your slave.”
This was very odd. I eyed the glowing pool of magma and considered just how odd it was. How had we gotten here? We’d retrieved the golden plaque, earned our points, and now, rather than preparing to take on our Markers, we were at the entrance of a natural furnace, doing God knows what, and Theo was again begging me for assistance. When I’d met him, he’d promised me knowledge in exchange for help retrieving the retrect. Here he was, asking for my help again, when he’d shared with me only a minimal amount of knowledge.
I wasn’t keen on bamboozlement.
Yet . . .
Maybe it was his desperation, but I felt my foothold on the ground lessen a little. What was I wary of, exactly? Though untrustworthy, I didn’t think my partner capable of foul play, and even if he was, I knew I could take him in any match.
I studied the meager boy. This Theodorius was far different from the Theodorius I’d first met. Somewhere along the way, his doe eyes had lost their shine. Somewhere in the last hour, he’d lost his energy. At one point or another, dark circles had crept beneath his eyes.
He was plagu
ed.
Had this been a sudden onset, or had I not been paying enough attention to notice? No, I’d seen glimmers of it; I’d simply chosen to ignore it.
Whatever he was hiding I wanted to know.
I wiped the beading sweat from my forehead before starting across the molten lake. Theo’s false grin fell in an instant. “Z-Zill?!” I was doing what he had just begged of me, yet he didn’t look any cheerier.
Well, it was too late. I had decided to cross the pit, and that’s what I was going to do. I pushed the plagued boy aside and made my way into the scorching air.
The mouth of the bridge was wide enough for two people to stand side-by-side, but it narrowed drastically toward the center, to the point where I had to turn and inch along it sideways. The rock was uneven and decided to jut wherever it pleased, and more often than not, my steps kicked loose gravel into the lava below. The fall was too long to hear them plop. Still, the heat of the pit radiated upwards, engulfing everything along the way, me included.
More sweat accumulated on my neck.
“Ick.”
I didn’t turn back to see how Theo was faring. I kept my sights set on the far side of the structure, where the supposed cave lay.
When I was two-thirds of the way across, I noticed a shadow on the wall. No, it wasn’t a shadow; it was a hollowed out groove in the wall of the basin. I couldn’t tell how deep from where I was. As far as a cave was concerned, I guess Theo had been telling the truth.
It was at that point that I finally turned to check on the boy. He was crawling on all fours along a particularly unsteady portion of rock.
I shook my head at myself for ever thinking him a threat.
When at last I reached the end, my shirt was painted to my back. I took a generous portion of water from my canteen, while waiting for Theo to finish his trek. When he reached me, he was in even worse shape. His face was red, his hair soaked, and it was impossible to tell that his shirt wasn’t part of his skin – attributed to how badly it had been bonded on with perspiration.
