by T. J. Berry
“One bite down, three to go,” said Ricky, nudging Gary with the toe of her shoe.
Gary tightened his grip on the wagon and went back for a second bite, grabbing it and flicking it to the back of his throat in one quick motion. He sagged sideways toward the floor.
Seeing there was no threat to themselves this time, the patrons crowded close. Lieutenant Cy pushed ahead of everyone. His officer status silenced any protests from the COs, but they still shot dirty looks at his back.
Gary swallowed a third bite. The sound that came out of him was a mix of whinny and whimper. The pie was tearing through his insides. Even as they healed moments later, the sensation was agony.
“The final bite. Can he do it?” asked Ricky.
Gary shoveled the final piece of the pie into his mouth and tilted his head back. It went down and so did he, lying face up on the floor, helpless. He told himself that getting horizontal was not a weakness, it was a smart strategy. The pie was less likely to tear through thick abdominal muscles than delicate intestinal tissue.
Ricky pointed her ocular display at Gary and his strained face appeared above the room at triple its normal size. His breathing was quick but controlled, like someone giving birth. He groaned as the pie moved inside him. The audience cheered and clapped. Ricky tapped a timer into the corner of the projection that counted down from a minute.
“That pie is tugging at your insides, Gary,” said Ricky, flashing a grin at the patrons. “Stretching your stomach until it’s about to tear at the seams. It will bathe your organs in acid and bile, eating them away.” Gary winced and the crowd laughed.
“You can let it come out if you like. Just hang yourself over the wagon and it’ll fly back out the way it came. No more pain,” offered Ricky.
Gary groaned, laid his arm across his eyes, and curled his legs up to his chest, forgetting for a moment that his hooves were in full view. Lieutenant Cy stumbled past him and over to the bar where he spoke with the Gravitas-drinking fellow. Gary dropped his legs and cursed his carelessness.
“Thirty seconds,” called Ricky, tapping her foot on the floor impatiently, waiting for him to fail.
The crowd salivated at his agony, especially now that they could all see that he wasn’t fully human. Only a handful seemed to understand that he was not just a common faun. Gary could pick them out by the way they inched toward the wagon with a sudden alertness. The prospect of striking it rich had sobered them up with remarkable speed. Jenny rolled closer as well, nudging people out of the way with her footrests.
There was more interest than usual in leaving Earth these days. This was the year of the Century Summit; the hundred-year anniversary of the end of the war between humans and Bala. Though both sides knew those words were hollow and devoid of meaning. The Reason had continued the battles long after the omniscient Pymmie had put an end to the open hostility. Gary often wondered why the Pymmie would bother imposing a false peace knowing that it would be broken the moment they left.
In any case, the all-powerful Pymmie were scheduled to return in less than a day to take account of what had happened during their hundred-year absence. Bala throughout Reasonspace were attempting to find passage to Jaisalmer for the meeting to plead their case for assistance. And humans, in true human style, were treating the visitation as an excuse to hold a party. Gary would wager that more than a few of those around him were hoping to win enough to attend the Summit. For those who figured out what he was made of, even a tiny piece of him was a shuttle ticket to Jaisalmer.
“Forty-five seconds.”
Ricky rested one sparkling shoe on his chest, digging the heel into his pectoral muscles. It left a footprint on his ragged prison shirt in someone else’s blood. Some of the audience clutched their stomachs in sympathetic pain.
“One minute. Gary has done it! No one gets this far very often. Give him a hand for completing the second challenge,” she called out with decidedly less enthusiasm than before. There was a halfhearted smattering of applause from around the room. Gary remained on the floor, huffing and wincing as the pie shifted in his abdominal cavity.
Ricky lowered her voice so everyone in the room had to quiet down in order to hear. She paced in front of Gary as the servers wheeled the wagon away.
“We have arrived at the final task. We’ve seen so much together today. I feel like we’re family now. Did you wake up this morning knowing that you would be standing mere feet away from a Sixian parrot? Or come within striking distance of a slice of singularity pie?” asked Ricky.
She put her hand out to steady a swaying Lieutenant Cy, walking back from the bar. The Gravitas-drinking officer had stayed put. Gary nurtured a spark of hope that they weren’t here for him after all.
“That’s why you come to the Bitter Blossom, isn’t it?” Ricky continued, pulling on the uniform lapel of the next closest corrections officer, a slight woman spattered with green vegetal liquid that probably belonged to a dryad. “To experience the unexpected. To witness the extraordinary. And to drink.” Ricky held up her glass. “Let’s toast to Gary, who has demolished two of my three most difficult challenges and is about to win back his stoneship.”
Servers refilled glasses and charged accounts as fast as their limbs could type.
“To Gary!” Ricky shouted.
“To Gary,” the crowd echoed weakly.
Gary propped himself up on one elbow, the pie having settled itself somewhere in his torso. He pulled himself up into a chair with a grunt. Jenny rolled up to the front row and tried to catch his eye. This time he pointedly ignored her. He was minutes away from winning back his ship. If he could simply complete the third challenge, victory was within his grasp.
Ricky reached under her game table and slid something behind her back. Whatever it was, there was nothing she had in the third bag that could possibly deter him.
“The final task – and make no mistake, nearly none of our guests get this far…” Ricky looked pointedly at Cinnabottom, who sat crumpled against the wall, sucking on ice. “This challenge comes from the ultramarine satchel.”
From behind her back, Ricky pulled out a heavy sack covered in short hairs dyed a vibrant shade of blue. Gary’s heart pounded. His hands shook as he took it from her.
The hairs stood on end as his fingers touched the bag. The material itself seemed to shift under his hand, drawing itself closer to him. His insides felt like liquid. This was a unicorn pelt.
“Anyone you know?” asked Ricky softly with a smirk.
Not only did Gary probably know the previous owner of the pelt, they were most likely related by blood. The unicorn family tree was small and tightly interconnected. There were rituals one could perform to draw a unicorn’s name out of a piece of their carcass, but this wasn’t the time or place. He let his prison mask come down and pretended that his chest didn’t ache with the agony coursing out of that scrap of skin.
“Secondhand, of course. I don’t have a permit to hunt unicorn,” said Ricky with an innocent shrug toward Lieutenant Cy.
“You’re a monster,” said Gary, clutching his abdomen with one hand and the bag with the other. The audience watched eagerly for Ricky’s response. Would she launch a barrage of throwing stars from the wall? A cascade of molten rock from the ceiling? People prepared themselves to run in case the punishment inflicted any collateral damage.
Ricky held his gaze with her own glittering brown eyes.
“As if you should talk. At least I didn’t eat my girlfriend,” she said off mic. She blinked and her voice rose above the crowd.
“Pick already, big guy.”
Gary’s fingers pawed through the bag. The balls inside pinged and resonated like metal bells. He spent a long time fishing around, grabbing a ball and bringing it halfway out, only to have it fall from his hand and another jump into its place.
In the front row, Jenny tried frantically to get his attention. From under her hood, she glared at him. When Ricky looked away, she waved. He steadfastly refused to acknowledge h
er. He was so close.
“Pick now or forfeit the game,” said Ricky, annoyed at his insistence on finding an unrigged ball. Gary sighed, pulled out the trick ball, and handed it to Ricky.
“What a surprise… dealer’s choice!” she announced, holding the ball up for the room to see. “Ah Gary. How could I possibly select from the list of delights and deviations at my disposal? Any suggestions from the audience? You drink for free if I pick your challenge.”
There was no way she would let a patron choose. Ricky already had a task in mind that would guarantee the Jaggery would stay with her and she would win his ante.
“Make him fight the twinzels!” called a CO.
“Good choice, but they’re in heat right now. I can barely separate the pair, let alone get them to fight. Next?”
“Supernova surfing!” shouted the woman covered in dryad sap. Ricky rolled her eyes.
“Delightful! But how would we get everyone up to Pegasi? The fuel alone would eat up my margins. Anyone else? Lieutenant Cy?”
“Sixian parrot,” mumbled Cy. Ricky pointed at him in mock disbelief.
“Really? Cy baby, have another drink. Maybe it’ll bring you back around to coherent.” Cy’s friends laughed.
“All right. I gave you kids a chance, but you’re not thinking big enough.” She turned to Gary, putting her back to the audience for the first time. “No, I have the perfect challenge in mind for old Gary here. Something he’ll avoid at all costs, unless he wants to go back to the Quag… or worse.”
She was quiet for a moment, allowing the room to fall silent behind her.
“Gary Cobalt, take off your hat.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Take Off Your Hat
Ricky waited for the crowd to roar, but the spectators at the front grumbled and frowned at her final challenge. They hadn’t waited here through the piercing cries of the Sixian parrot or the ozone stench of singularity pie just to have the final challenge be something so simple as Gary taking off his hat. A few people sat back down at their tables, restarting their card games with disappointed grumbles.
“What kind of task is that?”
“What a ridiculous waste of time.”
“This place gets worse every year.”
Ricky waited patiently for the patrons to settle down. She put a hand on Gary’s shoulder, whether to keep him from running or to reassure him, he couldn’t tell.
On his part, Gary was beginning to think he might need Jenny’s help after all. This challenge was more complex than it seemed. If he left his hat on, he would lose the challenge and the Jaggery was forfeit – not to mention Ricky would take most of his blood and leave him out on the street to die. On the other hand, if he took his hat off and the crowd saw the divot in his skull that shimmered with the faintest hint of horn growth, they would claw apart every precious scrap of his body.
Ten years ago, he would have flung his hat off defiantly and torn every creature in the room to red-blooded bits with his teeth and hands. He had more than once felt the crunch of a human skull under his hooves. Today, he was feeling more circumspect, not to mention tired of fighting. Ten years in the Quag could do that to a man.
Gary considered his options carefully. He let Ricky become distracted by the jeers arising from the crowd. Feeling betrayed at the simplicity of the final challenge, they began to root for the underdog.
“Just take off your hat, man.”
“Yeah, win back your ship.”
“Do it.”
Ricky tried to stem the tide of pro-Gary sentiment.
“A round of drinks on me if he loses,” she announced. It barely made a difference. People were starting to realize that they stood a better chance of brokering a deal to get off the planet with Gary than with Ricky Tang who had fleeced them for years.
Gary sucked in his breath and clutched his gut. The pie was looking for a way out, and so was he. He looked behind him, and Cowboy Jim was still standing outside that back window. The last time he’d seen Jim, the old man had sworn bloody revenge on Gary and all his kin. He looked just as irate as ever.
Jenny inched forward and tapped him with her chair.
“Take off your hat,” she said, just like every other heckler in the room. Her instructions couldn’t possibly have been clearer. He shook his head at her.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Just take off the bloody hat,” Jenny said. Gary belched and hot ozone gasses seeped out of his mouth, escaping from the pie. Jenny winced and turned her head.
“Why don’t you take off your hat?” sloshed Lieutenant Cy, leaning on another officer.
“I don’t get it,” said a filthy CO, punctuating her words with a spray of spittle. “You can’t take off your hat in exchange for an entire stoneship? What’s wrong with you?”
The realization descended on Ricky’s face like a sunset. She had badly miscalculated, thinking the largely human crowd would hope to keep the stoneship away from him. She’d neglected to take into account the deep desire of everyone on this planet to be off this planet. They were rooting for him to win because it gave them hope that they too could beat one of Ricky’s games.
“Just take it off, man. Get out of here.”
One of the few sober creatures in the room began a chant of “Take it off.” Ricky lifted her hands to quiet them, but she’d lost control.
“Everyone settle down. A round of drinks on me, but only if you’re sitting at a table,” she called.
A handful of people found chairs and sat. The rest of the group pushed forward.
“What if I pull his hat off? Do I get the ship?” asked Cinnabottom from the sidelines, suddenly interested in the proceedings. Creatures inched forward on all sides.
Jenny glared at Gary and raised her hand in a “what are you doing?” gesture.
“Take it off. We have a plan,” she whispered from under her hood.
Gary had been caught up in some of Jenny’s previous plans. They usually involved all manner of nefarious dealings, up to and including torture and murder. He wanted no part of that life again. He intended to get the Jaggery and travel as far away from Reasonspace as his horn would get him. If he could just figure out how to get the ship without dying.
She rolled up to him, footrests knocking into his shins. He turned to face her and the pie shifted. His eyes unfocused for a moment as some internal organ popped, then re-formed around the piece of pie.
“Come on Gary, let’s get the hell out of here,” said Jenny, dropping her hood.
Ricky Tang’s mouth dropped open.
“Aiyā, Jenny fucking Perata. You are not allowed in my bar,” she yelled.
She shoved Jenny’s chair back with her foot and Jenny put out her hands to stop her wheels. Gary tensed. Jenny hated when people moved her wheelchair without asking. He’d seen her bloody a man’s nose for trying to help her cross a street. She tapped the tablet in her lap and ducked. The gaming table beside them exploded. Pieces of wood and metal hit the windows, shattering them. The COs hit the deck and the Reason officers drew their weapons. Someone flipped a table for cover.
Ricky squealed and picked shreds of the leathery table out of her hair.
“Lockdown. Go on lockdown,” she yelled to the servers, who ran for their riot gear. Jenny motioned to Jim to get inside before blast doors came down. Instead, he used his elbow to knock the remaining glass out of a window and strained to get his foot up over the waist-high sill. Jenny grabbed the front of Gary’s shirt and yanked him down toward her. He grunted and burped out a stream of protomatter that smelled like sulfurous eggs.
“Take off your hat, Gary. Jim and I will get you out of the Blossom if you take us with you,” she yelled over the chaos.
Servers sprang into action, activating the heavy metal shields that began to slide down over the windows and doors. The customers scrambled for the exits, unwilling to be locked in with a pissed-off Ricky Tang. Ricky herself was climbing through the wreckage of the game table, picking out valuable items and stuffing them
into her pockets.
Gary sat calmly, conversing with Jenny as if they were meeting for tea.
“I will not go with you. Your dealings are criminal, you kidnapped and tortured me for nearly two years, and your companion swore blood revenge against me and my family,” he replied.
She shook him with one hand while keeping the other poised above her tablet.
“That is all true, but this is our… your one opportunity to get back into the Jaggery. We help you now or they tear you to shreds.”
She flicked her head toward the patrons who, in the absence of a clear opponent, had started fighting amongst themselves. A bold CO had taken a swing at an officer in the melee and was paying the price for it as the officer and her cohort kicked him into submission. Other corrections officers jumped into the melee, realizing that they had numbers and chaos on their side.
Lieutenant Cy had gone back to the officer at the bar and the two of them were pulling out their weapons. Even if he escaped the patrons, those two would absolutely pick him up for resource harvesting once he removed his hat. One of the patrons stepped up to him and Jenny and drew a knife as long as a child’s arm. A useful weapon here in Broome City where the fauna were as likely to kill you as the Reason.
Jenny tightened her grip on his shirt and pulled him closer.
“Ten years is a long time, Gary. Please.” It sounded, for all the world, like Jenny Perata was begging for his help. Which couldn’t be right. This woman had laughed when he had bitten her hard enough to shatter her bones. She’d punched out a necromancer who had attempted to turn her inside out with magic. This woman didn’t beg. Perhaps ten years was a long time.
“And you, Jenny Perata.” She flinched as he said her name. “Once again, you need my help.”
Jim pushed his way through the people clambering out of the back windows and knelt next to Jenny’s chair.
“Ready to go, Jen?” he asked, reeking of the cheap pipe tobacco he’d been smoking outside.
“I am, but Gary’s not so sure.”
Jim and Gary sized each other up. Jim looked like he was about to be sick. Gary’s rage softened with pity. Ten years hadn’t been kind to Jim. He’d already been old when Cheryl Ann died, subsisting primarily on pipe smoke and grilled cheese sandwiches. Now he was a dried-up shoelace of a man. Jim saw the change in Gary’s expression and he turned away, ashamed.
