by Alex Wells
“Is that not what you wanted to hear?” He tucked the finger bones into his pocket.
“Better’n being dead.” But worse than escaped. A lot worse than escaped. “Can you get more specific about where she is?”
“Not as I sit here, unless you have one of her bones. Is that all?”
What, so he’d know more if he sat somewhere else? Hob knew better than to demand more help from him; the Bone Collector cared about only his own affairs, was what Nick had always told her. Coming from someone like Nick, that made it a fair miracle that she’d gotten any help at all. She could at least take the information back that Mag was still here to Nick, and they could figure out what to do next.
Except…
She snapped her fingers. “Right… wanted to show this to you as well, see if you seen ’em before.” She handed him the little burlap sample bag. “It’s these little crystals, all pretty and blue. When I touched one, damn near took my hand off. Well, tried. If I could get burned by fire, I wouldn’t have been so happy.”
He undid the strings holding the bag shut and peered into it, as if he could see without the benefit of light. When he looked back up at her, his eyes were wide. “Where did you get these?”
“Off Phil’s body… he had it in his pocket. Dunno where he got ’em. You know what they are?”
He closed the bag back up and tucked it into his pocket. Looking at his face, Hob decided not to argue for now. “Do you recall that moment, when the claws of the phoenix sank into your eye?”
Just the mention of it had her touching the patch over her left eye. Even now, the empty socket below burned and throbbed. “Yeah.” But how the hell did he know that? She’d never told him. She’d only ever told Nick Ravani the full story, and just because she hadn’t been thinking so clear at the time. And while Old Nick might be friends with the Bone Collector – if friends were even a thing either of them did – she still couldn’t imagine him running his mouth off about something so personal to both of them. The phoenix was too strange, too much a hallucination, too painful, too damn private. She would have dismissed it entirely, but for the fact that from that moment on, she’d had sparks of flame dancing off her fingertips, fire pounding in her blood.
“Like that.”
“But they’re crystals.”
As if annoyed by her stating the obvious, he said, “Yes.”
“That don’t make a lick of sense.”
“It doesn’t have to.” He held out his hand. “Come along.”
“Excuse me?” The rapid back and forth turns of the conversation left her feeling dizzy.
“I want you to come with me. I… now have an interest in finding the dead man’s daughter. And I may need your help.”
Another sudden reversal, but this one was going in her direction. “Can I take my motorcycle?”
“It will be safe here. My way is faster.”
Hob frowned, and then shrugged. This was the best information she had, the only information she had for helping Mag. Not much of a choice, really. “Let me write a note for Nick, since he might send someone to check here once he’s gotten to Rouse.”
“Of course.”
The Bone Collector followed her over to the motorcycle, watched her write her note with more curiosity than the simple act really deserved. “You never seen handwriting or something?”
He smiled slightly. “Not any quite that terrible.”
“Yeah, fuck you,” Hob muttered. “Why you got this sudden interest in finding Mag, anyhow?”
“She may be… changed.”
What the hell did that even mean? She took her best guess. “She’s grown in three years, sure.”
“No. Changed like you did, when Nick sent you out into the dunes.” He reached out, pausing when she flinched, and then lightly laid his fingers beside her eye patch. “When you offered your eye to come home.”
“You’re gettin’ a mite too friendly, there.” The Bone Collector knowing this left her more spooked and off balance than if she’d just caught him peeping on her while she was bathing. Better to be angry, like she’d be for any other invasion of her privacy. “Don’t remember offering anyone any damn thing,” she muttered, and then shook her head. “Remember gettin’ my fuckin’ eye tore out by an eagle. That’s why you care, huh?”
“My reasons are legion.” He offered her his hand again; she took it, but then he shook his head and let go. “Take your gloves off.”
“Why?”
“Do you ask questions every time someone tells you to do something?”
“Can’t rightly do that back home, so I guess I got a powerful backlog to get out of my system now.”
He laughed. “Remarkable. Take off your gloves so that I can touch your skin. Otherwise, I might lose you.”
“Don’t sound pleasant, the way you say it.” Hob flicked away her half-finished cigarette, hitting it with a pulse of heat so that it burned to ash in the air. She pulled her gloves off, but hesitated before reaching for his hand again.
“You have another question?” A smile twitched at his lips.
For all she was used to Old Nick giving her looks like that all the time, Hob wanted to punch it right off the Bone Collector’s face. Maybe Nick wasn’t as handsome as this fellow, but at least he’d earned the right to look at her like she was a joke. “You got a name? Not supposed to go anywhere with strangers, y’know.”
The Bone Collector laughed, but it was an odd, flat sort of sound. “I don’t.” The humor fell away from his face in an instant and he caught her hand before she could react. “Would you like to give me one?”
His skin was cool, dry, no calluses that she could detect. It made her feel very rough and scratched up in comparison, and put a strange tingle up her arm, like there was some kind of electricity radiating off him. She hadn’t felt a thing like that in years, and maybe it felt good, but it set off every damn warning bell that she had in her brain. Dangerous. The sort of person who was bound to ask for things she shouldn’t give but would fool herself into thinking she wanted to. Want was a mirage over ugly truths, ready to lead you astray in the desert.
Hob squeezed his fingers hard as she could and was rewarded with a dismayed flicker in his eyes. “Everyone’s got a name. Don’t fuck with me.”
Hurt, emotional rather than physical, twisted at his mouth. “Not everyone.”
She might have been all right, if she hadn’t looked him in the eye. There was a world of pain on display there for a moment, so naked it made her want to cringe. Hob looked away first, loosening her grip. “Ain’t gonna happen.”
The Bone Collector didn’t let go of her hand. “Let’s not argue. We’ve more important concerns. Come along.” He pulled her over the little sand drifts, and then down the slipping slope of a flow of red, into the cellar. The foundation still visible was stained with streaks of rust like dried blood. There he paused, surrounded on three sides by walls half buried in sand. “Whatever you do, don’t let go.”
She tightened her grip again until he gasped, but he didn’t complain. “I think this is the craziest thing I’ve ever done.” And she’d done some crazy shit, up to and including going out into the desert on Nick Ravani’s say-so.
He smiled. “Yet.”
At first the sand was solid beneath her feet, but then it flowed, first slow and plastic like taffy and then fast like water, crashing up and over them both. Hob opened her mouth to scream, had just enough time to hear the Bone Collector whisper into her ear, “It will be all right, dearest, I won’t let you go,” as sand filled her mouth and nose and eyes.
Things went strange.
* * *
Hob’s brain froze with sheer terror, senses firing randomly because there was no input except pressure and movement. She focused on feeling the Bone Collector’s hand clasped in hers, his cool skin hard like stone, and more stone all around her. No matter how tightly she held on, she felt like he was about to slip away, flesh going smooth and slick.
Her ears rang with his voice, stretched o
ut infinitely. Her eyes filled with unseeing starbursts. She couldn’t breathe, yet her lungs felt so full they might burst, her heart hammering against them fit to bruise. She didn’t pass out. She wished she could pass out. Screaming also would have been nice, something to relieve that pressure as something far firmer than sand slid through her hair and tightened around her ribs and still he pulled her onward, faster and faster and no don’t let go of my hand–
Fingers touched her cheek, feather light. Her eye flew open – when had she squeezed it so tightly shut, her eyelid felt scratchy – and she looked up into the Bone Collector’s upside-down face. His blue eyes were filled with amusement and a little crack of pain.
“Let go of my hand now, please. Before you crush my bones.”
She felt a pull on her arm; somehow afraid to move her head, in case she felt rock instead of air against it, she looked with just her eye. She still clung to his other hand, knuckles gone white. His fingers, visible around hers, had taken on an unhealthy red tinge of the blood trapped inside. Huh, so he did have blood in him, actual blood instead of dust. What a thought to have, floating up out of a brain too scrambled to do more than make inane observations. One finger at a time, she made herself let go.
“Thank you.” He leaned over, his nose only a few centimeters from hers. “Try to breathe. In and out. It’s merely air, you don’t need to fear.”
She did as he said, and marveled at the working of her own lungs.
“Very good. You know, you’re taking this rather well.”
She managed a dry, croaking laugh. “Am I now.”
“You’re not crying. Or screaming. Those are the two reactions I’ve seen most often.” He smiled, his thumb moving lightly across her cheek.
She had to swallow hard, blink, and tried to refocus. They weren’t outside any more, that was for sure; there was a roof, more rock cut smoothly like butter, high overhead. And it was light, imagine that, steady and white, familiar enough to tell her it was a powered lamp like the kind the Ghost Wolves used. There was more rock under her back, but it was something far softer under her head; she was stretched out on his lap like some lovesick girl.
Hob sat up so abruptly that she nearly slammed her forehead into his chin; only a quick jerk back on his part saved him. He only seemed more amused. “Normally, I let people lay about and recover a bit longer.”
“Guess I’m quicker’n most.” She shook her head, grimacing, and then felt at her hair. Her braids were full of sand. A quick glance at the Bone Collector confirmed that he was neat as always, not a hair out of place. She undid the tails, jerking the knots out of her hair without regard, and roughly combed her fingers through to shake the worst of the sand out. The Bone Collector reached toward her – to help? touch? didn’t matter – and she slapped his hand sharply away. No one messed with her hair; it was her one bit of flip, considering the few other women in the outfit had all cut their hair short or even shaved their heads like the men, because it made wearing helmets all the time more comfortable.
He wiggled his fingers to shake off the sting. “So it seems. With a little practice, you won’t need a rest at all, I’m sure.”
“That how it normally works?” Fingers slowing out of habit, she separated the strands and began replaiting her braids.
He smiled, and stood. The rock ceiling was low over his head, but not so much that he couldn’t stand straight. Walls, ceiling, floor, it was all the same, dark gray with veins of pink and white, copper and gold, lit with yellow lamp light. “I can’t think of anyone else who has gotten a second try. Can you stand?”
She was a little unsteady on her feet, but she’d be damned if she’d let herself cling to him. “Don’t have time to waste, do we?”
He started walking down the tunnel; lamps were screwed into the walls at regular intervals, others in holders on old timbers – real wood, probably come in from the farming towns. There was little of that to be had on planet, and it all ended up in… “We’re in a mine,” she said, blinking stupidly.
“The Pictou mine, yes. I’ve blocked off the entrance at the surface, so it’s a safe enough place to stay.”
“Downright thrifty of you.”
“The humans were no longer using it. And it is very… defensible. Too many ghosts.”
There was a lot she could pull from what he’d said, and none of it sat well. Just the offhand mention of humans, like they really were two different species for all they looked the same, made her twist uncomfortably inside. “That’s some sound strategy you got goin’ there,” she finally remarked.
“Nick Ravani has proven an invaluable resource.”
Well, now it all made more sense. Nick Ravani was crazier than a shithouse rat, but when he was thinking about the long term she’d long since realized that he played his games of chess on levels no one could even see. Though it made her wonder how much of that was the Bone Collector’s influence. How well did they actually know each other?
Hob took her cigarette case from her pocket by habit, tucked one between her lips. The look the Bone Collector shot her could have curdled milk. “We’re inside.”
“I noticed.” She grimaced and put the cigarette away, wishing she had something to gnaw on while she thought. Too much, all at once, and all of it long past strange.
The Bone Collector took a left-hand branch, came into a much larger room that had been hollowed out. There was a bedroll spread out there, and a little stove with a coffee pot on top of it. “When the witch hunters take people into the big city, Newcastle, they go to one building. The largest of them, where the Weatherman is.”
“There’s a Weatherman here?” Hob asked. She’d never encountered a Weatherman before, not really. But she knew that Weathermen were the beating heart of the rift ships, revered and feared and never seen by ordinary crew rats like she’d been, and there were all sorts of theories about them being aliens, being monsters, being able to kill the unwary with a look. The thought that one had come to rest here and put his feet down on the ground felt wrong and terrifying to her remaining spacer superstitions.
There was a strange tightness to the Bone Collector’s face. “There has always been a Weatherman here, as long as Weathermen have existed. Your friend will be with him.”
“How do we get her out of there?” She had to swallow down the feeling of sickness along with all of her questions, telling herself to act like it was a job, just another job. Focus on that. “You ain’t ever done this before, have you?”
“They have ways of keeping me out. But now, I have an idea,” the Bone Collector said, his smile turning secretive.
Chapter Eight
Then
* * *
The next Mag knew, she opened her eyes to the featureless wall of her cell. Her head ached, still filled with the black and the horrible man’s voice. The inside of her left wrist hurt sharply, burning and throbbing. Her hand felt like it weighed a thousand kilos as she lifted it up to see a series of parallel lines scored into her skin with black ink. Making a frantic little whimper in her throat, she tried to wipe it away with one thumb, and it just hurt. Worse, she felt something hard and round, embedded under her skin and topped with the thin, red line of a scar.
Mag rolled from the bed and crawled over to the toilet, vomited until there was nothing left in her stomach and she was shaking and raw.
For all that her left wrist hurt, her right hand didn’t. Filled with dread, she checked her palm. The cuts had transformed to smooth scars, still angry and red, but healed like it had been weeks since she’d been cut instead of a couple of days. Maybe it had been. She flexed her fingers, then remembered the sensation of the man – no, he couldn’t be a man, whatever a Weatherman was, it was only man-shaped – licking her palm, and her stomach heaved again.
Mag curled up on the floor, knees hugged to her chest, and stared at the door with dry eyes. She had no reference for any of this but stories, novels, fairytales, the occasional vid. If she believed those, she should be brave and ready
to sing and maybe even dance, no matter how miserable she was at being imprisoned. She had a feeling whoever had written those stories had never been in this position, hip and shoulder digging into a synthcrete floor, mouth sour with bile. And shouldn’t she be rescued by now? Where was her knight? Maybe if Hob–
No. Hob really was a myth. Just like the friendly cartoon face in the pamphlet about rift ships, hiding the monster beneath. Weatherman Bill, her ass. She didn’t know and couldn’t begin to guess why the Weatherman was here, what he was doing to her. But when they came for her again, those guards with their fake courtesy, she would fight them. Fists and feet and teeth, she’d fight them, and if they knew what was good for them, they’d shoot her down.
With that resolve, the knot in her chest loosened and she could breathe again. Though when they slid the food tray through the slot in her door, she made no move to take it. The horrible, beautiful voice of the man-shaped thing still echoed in her head with more words she couldn’t understand, filling her blood with sickness.
* * *
Four uneaten meals later, the door to her cell opened. Mag pretended to be obedient until she’d gotten out of the door. Then just as the thought sparked in her brain to punch the man on her right and her muscles began to tense, something like a mule kicked her in the back. Her muscles went rigid, and she smelled ozone and charred fabric.
The taller of the guards caught her as her legs gave way. She tried to struggle against him, twitching feebly.
The shorter of the two guards waggled a black baton in front of her face. “Predictable. They always fight, the second time,” he said. “It’s easier for us all this way, scum.”
Mag tried to protest that she hadn’t been going to fight – she wasn’t going to bat an eyelash at lying now – but her mouth didn’t want to work. A nonsensical mumble spilled out between her lips.
The taller guard hitched her over his shoulder like a sack, and they walked down the hall.
