Soul Jar

by eden Hudson

  Het’s chubby face broke out in an ecstatic grin, maybe imagining the two of us running the witch’s errands together as best buds.

  “Yeah, but you didn’t mean it,” I said. “Besides, I did bring you something.”

  I waited until Re Suli opened her eyes and propped herself up on one elbow to see me better. Then, with a flourish, I made the soul jar appear in my hands.

  The soul fragment inside caught the sun just right and glittered like a fire opal.

  The witch’s blue eyes sparkled. “Now that is right pretty.”

  ***

  The archeo-technomancer messaged me that afternoon during my flight back to Emden to let me know the crawler was done. I stopped by his shop on the way to my loft so he could install it.

  When he was done, I opened up the file of texts I had gotten from that sunken city and ran a sample search for the First Earth words for “the dog” to make sure the crawler worked right. Within seconds, it returned more than ninety thousand results. I opened one.

  dragging grayish loops of intestine from the torso. She trained the rifle on the dog, not willing to let a creature with a taste for human flesh roam unchecked.

  I closed out of that book and stopped the search. While I’d been reading, the crawler had returned another three hundred thousand results.

  “Works like a charm, huh?” the technomancer said. “She’s a beaut, that one.”

  “For what I’m paying, she ought to be a supermodel with a vibrating tongue,” I said, entering the First Earth words for “Garden of Time” as my next search. Didn’t hurt to start with the obvious.

  “First of her kind I ever made,” the technomancer said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Second one’s going to the Guild.”

  My ears pricked up, but I kept my voice disinterested.

  “You don’t say. Who ordered it? Head scribe…” I snapped my fingers as if I were trying to remember. “Ah, what’s his name?”

  “Cuthbert.”

  “Yeah, ol’ Fishdick Cuthy! Same workup? Crawler that can read First Earth characters?”

  “The very same,” the technomancer said.

  Interesting. I’d had the computers from the sunken city job gift wrapped and sent to the head scribe after the technomancer had salvaged all of the salvageable information from them. Maybe Fishdick had convinced himself he could cobble something together from the gibberish that had been left behind. Or maybe he had ordered the crawler as a way to make me doubt whether I really did have all of the salvageable information off the computers. Maybe he was trying to play on my paranoia, make me assume he wanted to find the Garden of Time before I did or that he had vital information I had discarded thinking it was garbage.

  “Classic Cuthy,” I said, grinning and shaking my head. “Always a step behind me.”

  Which was still too close.

  TWENTY-SEVEN:

  Carina

  Carina came back to herself when she saw the razorblade of the loading screen, but she lay still through the entirety of the credits, just breathing. In the real world, her eyes felt hot and her throat ached, but the Comfort Geloam’s nanotech cleared away her tears as fast as they could well up, presumably to maintain the base lubrication and salinity they had recorded as her standard state. When the static screen appeared, giving her the options to play Story Mode, Tsunami Tsity Unbound, or Tsunami Tsity Online, she selected Quit, then Shut Down Console.

  The lid wheezed open and Carina sat up. She could feel that the apartment was empty, but she called out just to be sure.

  “Nick?”

  Nothing. The kind of stillness known as Advanced Silence in the self-contained language of their relationship.

  Carina climbed out of the coffin—groaning softly at the return of all her body’s familiar aches and pains—then onto Nick’s bed and wrapped the blankets around herself, inhaling his perfect scent. She checked the time on her wristpiece. Nick was probably at the shop, working on something. She wished he was there in the vague way that she always wished her fiancé was around when he wasn’t, but she was also glad to be alone. She would message him after she’d had time to process what she’d just gone through.

  The bittersweet ending of the game hung around her like fog.

  Miyo had died, that much Carina was sure of. Maybe they had dosed Miyo with Envishtu’s Draught, and the drug had induced hallucinations of fire exploding off of her skin and enveloping her assailants, as well as her friend returning as the flame spirit. Or maybe the bottle exploding had been a symbol of Miyo’s sanity breaking, the beginning of a delusion to comfort her during a horrible death. Or maybe Yisu the flame spirit really had rescued Miyo from her body before they burned her. Whichever interpretation was correct, the high priestess of Tsunami Tsity was definitely dead.

  Carina swiped the hair off of her cheek, realizing as she did it that she was using just her ring and pinkie fingers. She ran her thumb over the bladeless pads of her first two fingers, resetting her brain. This was the world of skinners instead of fleshers, the Guild instead of the temple, Van Zandt instead of Yisu.

  Most people Carina tried to explain influential action to assumed that influencing someone was hard, that you had to follow some esoteric ritual to gain control over your subject, but that wasn’t true. The hard part wasn’t manipulating emotion or poking around in someone’s heart, it was coaxing that person to open up in the first place.

  Van Zandt was trying to open up to Carina. It was why he’d asked her to play Tsunami Tsity. He wanted to be understood. Like Miyo.

  Playing through hadn’t shown her what in the game alerted Van Zandt to danger before it happened, but she suspected he had something like hyperawareness, noticing tiny environmental cues other people didn’t and interpreting them correctly. That would explain the times he seemed unable to shut his mouth or stop moving—studies had shown that episodes of hyperawareness often led to episodes of hyperproduction as the brain finished processing its new information. Maybe Van Zandt had even linked some sort of visual signal from the game to moments of danger, like the flashing yellow warning light or the transparent objective prompts, so it could override any extraneous information he was taking in and help him see the danger before it was too late. She would find out over biscuits and gravy.

  She opened her messages. According to the date on her wristpiece, she’d been in virtual reality for four days. Nothing urgent had come in. There were a few mass sends from the Guild letting everyone know that there were still no updates on the Tect situation and that someone had proposed bringing in known technomancers from around Emden to shake them down for information. There was also a message from Van Zandt sent the day after she’d started playing Tsunami Tsity.

  JVZ 11:19:16 Your job is to cry when it gets too beautiful.

  Carina smiled. She started to message him “Mission accomplished.”

  But before she could finish the message, someone knocked at the door. It wasn’t the sort of knock she was used to hearing from Guild knights—an authoritative three-strike announcement—but more cheerful.

  Maybe Nick had ordered in supper, but gotten caught up in whatever he was working on at the shop and forgot. That had been known to happen when he was drafting something new.

  After four days’ worth of nothing but time-release nutritional supplements, Carina’s mouth watered at the thought of food. She hoped it was from that Soami place down on Reeds.

  She slipped out from under the covers and headed to the kitchenette, getting to the door just as whoever was outside knocked again. She opened it.

  The bright smile of an artisan gift basket delivery man greeted her. “Hello! Is Mr. Ronin home?”

  Only intuition kept Carina from saying the delivery company had the wrong address. Ronin was Nick’s mother’s maiden name.

  “He’s not here right now.” Carina glanced over the twin bottles of cask-aged mead artfully surrounded by shimmery décor fabric. “I can sign for it, though.”

  “That’s all right! As lon
g as this is the right residence, I don’t need a signature,” the delivery man said. “You can just have him scan the message tag when he gets here for Hubert & Sons’ full congratulations on his big win!”

  Carina brought the gift basket inside and sat it on the counter. She’d never heard of Hubert & Sons before. She’d have to ask Nick about it when he got back.

  Two hours later, though, she was still waiting. She walked down to the Guild’s mech shop. No one there could remember seeing Nick in at least three days, but the project heads he usually worked with said he had been answering their messages.

  When she made it back to the elevator alone, Carina messaged her fiancé to ask where he was. Then she went back up to his apartment to wait, a sick feeling in her iron stomach.

  TWENTY-EIGHT:

  Jubal

  According to the SilverPlatter app, Carina finally checked her messages the same night I picked up the text crawler. She had finished Tsunami Tsity.

  But she didn’t message me right away. She messaged Nick. Then she spent some time looking up Hubert & Sons, which meant that their customary new-client gift basket had been delivered right on schedule.

  The filter I had set up to block Nick’s messages had already deleted eight attempts to contact Carina, probably all scrambling to explain. He wouldn’t be sending any more of those, but I kept the filter on anyway. Better safe than sorry.

  A little after midnight, Carina sent Nick a voice message he would never hear.

  “Hey, love, where are you? I’m still at your place… I finished Tsunami Tsity… When do you think you’ll be home?”

  There was an ache in her voice. She was trying to sound casual, but I could feel it in my gut, a bright white thrill of pain when she said Hey, love, and again in the long pause after saying she’d finished Tsunami Tsity.

  I listened to the voice message six more times. Then I messaged her.

  JVZ 01:02:09 Jeez, Carina, are you done with Tsunami Tsity yet?

  She didn’t get back to me right away because her desire for me was warring with her need to figure out what exactly her fiancé was doing sneaking around behind her back. But that was all right—I knew which one was going to win.

  While I waited, I took a shower, ate some chocolate caramel cookie-crunch bars, then started reading one of the eleven hits my text crawler had turned up so far searching for “Garden of Time.” I had just discounted that hit and moved on to another when her message came in.

  CX 01:43:28 It was beautiful.

  JVZ 01:43:56 Want to take me out to breakfast so you can tell me how long you cried?

  A Carina-pause followed. I finished the crunch bar I was working on, then grabbed the keys to the Culebra and put on my jacket, sneaks, and ventilator while I waited her out.

  CX 01:54:29 Sure. It’s six a.m. somewhere.

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  Finishing a good book sucks. It’s over. Now what?

  If you want to be the first to know when the Garden of Time comes out, sign up for my mailing list at http://eepurl.com/cdA_4n. Mailing list peeps always get the first crack at new releases, discounts, and free junk.

  If you loved or hated this book, you can help keep Jubal in business—or try to put him out of it—by leaving a review here: Soul Jar: A Jubal Van Zandt Novel

  About the Author

  I am invincible. I am a mutant. I have 3 hearts and was born with no eyes. I had eyes implanted later. I didn’t have hands, either, just stumps. When my eyes were implanted they asked if I would like hands as well and I said, “Yes, I’ll take those,” and pointed with my stump. But sometimes I'm a hellbender peeking out from under a rock. When it rains, I live in a music box.

  But I’m also a tattoo-addict, coffee-junkie, drummer, and aspiring skateboarder. I love you. Let’s be friends.

  Hang out with me on Goodreads

  Drop me a line: imedenhudson@gmail.com

  Take a look behind the curtain: WhiteTrashCappuccino.com

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you so much for reading! Your support is awesome and I love you for it. You know who’s even happier than me that you read my books? The world. The world is so thankful that your continued readership keeps a dangerous writer like me off the streets that they said it twice as their “This Year I’m Thankful For…” at supper last Thanksgiving. The world shudders to think what might happen if I didn’t spend all my time dreaming up new stories for your entertainment, and as such, the world should also be thankful for these amazing deities, vocors, and heathens who helped me bring Soul Jar to you:

  God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—thanks for the heart of flesh. It’s so tender, and the flavor is heavenly.

  The ballers and shot callers on my all-star ARC team—Tim, Shannon, Silvia, Mike, Koeur and Rebecca.

  Tim McBain and James Hunter, both of whose amazing books you should be reading instead of wasting your precious time on mine.

  Everybody at Shadow Alley Press, whose hard work is the reason this book looks, smells, and tastes incredible.

  The Op boys and girl—Will, Ronny, and Kensey. The isolationist fellowship of the four.

  My Joshua. Everything I do is to impress this guy.

  And Casey. So it goes.

  Copyright

  Jubal Van Zandt and the Soul Jar is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by eden Hudson and Shadow Alley Press, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the publisher, subject line “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.

  JamesAHunter@outlook.com