by Tim Pratt
“I can think of shomething,” Howlaa said. She knocked Templeton down and began beating his head and chest. Fragments of plastic and metal sprang free.
“Damn it!” Templeton shouted. “A little warning next time, let me turn off my sensory inputs, or at least flip the switch that lets me interpret pain as pleasure.” He made a low moan. “Ah, there, yes, just like that. Bash away, big boy.”
“Eww,” I said.
Howlaa stepped back. “This ish unpleashantly non-consenshual.”
“I’m just coping in my own way.” Templeton sat up with a whine of overstressed motors. “It’s going to take me hours to return this damage.”
“That’s what you get for seeding a Mabling recruitment potluck with nanites,” Wisp said. “You know they’re allergic to machines. Next time, our mistress the Faerie Queen might do more than send us to beat you up.”
“Oh, is that what I did.” Templeton unscrewed one of his eyes, removed it, and examined the cracked lens. “I am a bastard. Listen, you assholes – you come back for me when you’ve finished your mission. I didn’t help you for free.”
“We keep our promishesh,” Howlaa said. She led the way out, and Wisp went dark and floated inconspicuously with us.
“You’re lucky that’s all we did!” I shouted back into Templeton’s room, and tried to look like a smug brainwashed fairy fancier as we went down the stairs.
“You all need a post-brawl drink?” the bartender said.
“It wasn’t a brawl,” I said. “Just a friendly message.”
“I thought the noise of crunching components and breaking glass sounded pretty friendly,” the bartender said.
Back on the thronged street, I said, “Okay, so what are we doing now?”
“I was serioush,” Howlaa said. “Lunch. We’ve been living on shcraps for too long. Now we’re in the city. Now we can get shomething good.”
“The restaurant district it is,” Wisp whispered in my ear.
My belly growled – it had been growling pretty regularly, but now it really growled, apparently alerted to the possibility of real solid food. I hadn’t had anything substantial since the Regent’s dinner party. “What are we going to eat?”
“The best food in the universes can be found here,” Wisp said. “Come along.”
I had to do my playing-it-cool thing again as we navigated the broad avenue. Howlaa led the way to a moving walkway that snaked up through the air, apparently unsupported, like a silver ribbon in the wind. We stepped onto the walkway along with a cross-section of the bizarre residents of the Nex, from dolphins with legs and bubbling fluid-filled helmets to tiny wizened men on robotic stilts to a girl about my age in a ballet dancer’s tutu smoking a long black cigarette. All these people had names, cultures, histories, lives – they’d all been stolen away to this place, or descended from others stolen long ago, and made their lives here. I remember how stunned I’d felt in school when one of my teachers told me there were almost 300 countries on Earth, and 7,000 living languages – how could there possibly be so many? How could I ever hope to visit all those places, and speak to everyone I found there? And Nexington-on-Axis made Earth seem like a little hick town, smaller even than Pomegranate Grove.
As we rose into the air – high enough that I clenched the rail as hard as I could – I got my first look at the Nex from above, and the city spread out as far as I could see in all directions. Out where we were, the streets were more-or-less straight, a pretty comprehensible grid, but closer to the center things got narrow, jumbled, and cramped, like an old historical district surrounded by modern outskirts. And at the very center rose a building that stood high above everything else, a curved thing of domes and minarets and swooping arches, all made of stone that changed color in the sun and seemed, in places, to flow like water. I half-turned and craned my head to keep looking at the thing.
The ballet dancer glanced at me. “Yeah, it’s got some new towers today. Kind of pretty. Hope they keep them.”
“What?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Stupid Mabling,” she muttered, tossing her cigarette over the side and walking away.
Apparently I was not disguised as the member of a universally popular clique.
“The palace,” Wisp said in my ear. “The building at the center of the city. It is a living thing, in its way, changing shape, growing new towers, new arches, rising up, changing daily.”
“Awesome,” I said.
“Makes it difficult to break in,” Wisp said. “There are no blueprints, no floor plans – that’s why you can’t jump to specific coordinates inside safely. But with the jump-engine, we should be able to navigate, room by room. Once you’ve practiced a bit and feel comfortable with your abilities, you can take us inside with you. The snatch-engines are vast, but smashing them is within Howlaa’s powers, and you can scatter the fragments throughout the universe. Then we’ll be free to go wherever we like, without fear of being recaptured.”
“Eat now, plan later,” Howlaa said, and tugged me toward a branching side-path on the walkway. We went down a drop so steep I had to close my eyes and breathe slowly to keep from puking, then leveled out close to the ground again and stepped off the walkway. I stumbled a little coming off it – Way to look like a tourist, Miranda, though I guess the Nex doesn’t have tourists, just immigrants, pretty much by definition – and Howlaa caught my arm and steadied me. “The reshtaurant dishtrict,” she said.
The buildings were as weird and varied as they were elsewhere: a mammoth tree with rope ladders and platforms loaded with diners, all pulling fruit from branches; a dead Ferris wheel with a guy serving cotton candy and fried dough from one of the cars; a slowly-revolving glass globe filled with fluttering bugs, with bug-people inside snatching live food from the air; and more. “Is there any human food here?”
“Some,” Wisp said. “But mostly fusion restaurants. Nagalinda-Peruvian is quite good. And Dagonite-Mediterranean is marvelous seafood, with delicacies shipped in from the Landlock Sea.”
“Could I maybe ease into the multicultural thing?”
“There are some purer examples of human cuisine,” Wisp said. “Mostly clustered a few streets down. Though they do make use of local ingredients, which won’t always match your previous experience.” We passed street vendors serving everything from hot dogs to twitching things impaled on sticks, and the air was a mosh pit of smells, savory banging up against sweet knocking over sour shoving rotten aside. Every once in a while I’d get a noseful of something mouth-wateringly delicious, and then some millipede thing would go by eating from a plastic bowl that smelled like an open sewer and my guts would churn.
I was relieved when we turned a corner onto a street lined with pretty-much conventional-looking buildings. Funny how a street with an adobe Mexican restaurant and a wooden steakhouse next to a Japanese teahouse with paper walls looked familiar and normal here, when such a combo back home would’ve been weird and jarring.
“What are you in the mood for?” Wisp asked. “Thai? Mexican? French? Guatemalan? Hmong?”
“Wishp talksh a lot about food for shomeone who doeshn’t eat,” Howlaa said. “Like a virgin going on and on about shex.” She paused. “Not that, ah, there’sh anything wrong with virginsh, I mean, if you’re...”
I stopped, staring, and lifted my arm to point.
“What is it?” Wisp said.
“That,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry, my legs trembling. “That building.”
“Yesh? Rushtic French Cuishine? We can eat there if you want.”
“No. It... That was my Dad’s restaurant. The one that blew up.”
Chapter 11
“Suddenly the Regent’s claim seems much more plausible,” Wisp said.
I barely heard him. I just stared at Etienne’s, the restaurant looking exactly as I remembered it – the name written in elaborate script on the awning, the big front windows revealing a bright and airy dining room that became dark and cozy when night fell. Tables covered in clo
th and set with crystal glasses, the length of the bar in the back of the room, the swinging doors that led to Dad’s domain, the kitchen, where he’d shown me how to crack eggs one-handed and promised to teach me fancy knifework once I got old enough that Mom wouldn’t freak. The only difference was the quality of the diners inside – instead of the more well-off citizens of Pomegranate Grove (and the occasional scattering of ordinary people out for a special occasion), the tables were populated by the usual motley that surrounded us on the street, all sipping wine and eating food that... food that my father had made? Really?
I started toward the restaurant, and Howlaa laid a hand on my shoulder. I shrugged her off, and then it was both hands, one on each shoulder, and her leaning down to whisper in my ear: “The Regent ish sure to have people watching thish place, Randy. We should get away.”
“My Dad might be in there.”
“All the more reason to tread carefully,” Wisp said. “So your reunion can be a happy one.”
“I am not going to risk my life without at least trying to see if my Dad is alive first, guys. What do you think will happen? They’ll catch me? I can freaking teleport.”
“Not if they have snipers armed with tranquilizers, and knock you out before you can,” Wisp said.
“I’m willing to risk it,” I said. “I don’t know if Bodiless or skinchangers have parents, but I do, and if my Dad is still breathing, I need to know.”
Howlaa’s grip tightened, at first, and I thought I was going to have a fight on my hands, but then she let go. “Jusht be careful,” she murmured. Howlaa and Wisp faded back, though I could still feel a little Wisp-mote hovering in my ear. I walked into the restaurant, trying to figure out how to get to the kitchen unnoticed – if Dad was here, he’d be in the back. He hated front of the house. Said he was comfortable cooking, but didn’t like to see how people reacted to his food. His version of stage fright.
Before I got two steps in, the hostess glided up to me. She was human, tall, thin like a shishkabob skewer, with long blonde hair and a weird ruby-red monocle over one eye, with a lens that twisted and spun. “Miranda Candle?” Her voice was all warmth and welcome, and I stopped.
“Um,” I said.
She tapped her monocle. “I see you’ve... joined a new subculture since the photograph I saw was taken, but facial feature ratios don’t lie. We’ve been expecting you. Come with me to the private dining room?”
I glanced to the right, automatically, toward the room reserved for private parties. Cal had his thirteenth birthday party in there. “I don’t remember making a reservation,” I said. “How did you know I was coming?”
Her one human eye twinkled. “A certain gentleman of your acquaintance made the arrangements. He’s eager to see you again.”
Dad? I followed her, and she opened the door. The private room was dim, the hanging lights turned off, just a candle burning in the center of the table. I stepped inside, and the hostess shut the door behind me. I heard the click of a lock engaging and my heart sank. A lock wouldn’t keep me here, if push came to shove, but it told me I wasn’t meeting my Dad.
The Regent leaned into the circle of the candle’s light. “Hello, Miranda. So nice to see you again. The disguise is a nice effort, and bravo for getting rid of the tracking devices, but my greatest strength has always been understanding the psychology of my rivals. I knew you’d come here, once I told you about your father. The hook was set.”
“I want to see my Dad.” I crossed my arms.
“Oh, my,” he said softly. “Your jewelry has changed. Tell me, was it simple trial and error to change the settings, or did Howlaa smuggle out a draft of the user’s manual? Or... no. You found someone to give you advice, didn’t you? I knew Howlaa must have contact with someone who knew about the jump-engine project. She’s no good at detective work, really – just extermination. Was it Templeton? I should have dismantled him, but I have a pathetic tendency to hold onto everything, just in case I need it in the future. A certain... hoarding mentality... comes along with proximity to the royal orphans, I think.”
“If you’re done monologuing, I’d really love to see my Dad now. Or would you rather get punched into outer space again? I’ve got a little more control now.” I cracked my knuckles, thinking it was a pretty good dramatic gesture, and now that my fingers were mostly clear of rings, I could do it without pinching myself. “You might not wind up in an orbital pleasure palace. You might just end up in orbit.”
“A counter-offer. You can come with me to a very pleasantly-appointed lab, where you’ll be treated kindly while my scientists disconnect the jump-engine from your limbic system – that’s the deep old reptile part of your brain, the fight-or-flight part, the place where the engine is most deeply entrenched.”
I looked at my ring. “This is in my brain?”
“Parts of it, yes. You’re just a cog in the engine now, Miranda. Let me disconnect it before things spin even more out of your control. Let me give you your life back.”
“Fu–”
“Please!” The Regent held up his hands. “Hear my entire proposal. I remove the engine. I reunite you with your father. I use the engine to send both of you back home, and never trouble either of you again. How does that sound?”
Familiar. “I don’t trust you.”
“I’ll swear before as many witnesses as you like. I’ll have my magisters draw up ironclad contracts. I’ll cross my heart and hope to die. I have nothing to gain from betraying you. All I want is the engine. I can give you something you want in return. Ask anyone – I am a reasonable man. I am not vindictive.” He chuckled. “I prefer to outlive my enemies in lieu of exacting revenge.”
I sat down. I wasn’t a zillion-year-old tyrant, but I knew when I had bargaining power. “What about Wisp and Howlaa?”
His mouth tightened. “They will be returned to their regular duties, pending reeducation.”
“Brainwashing, you mean?”
“Their brains are remarkably resistant to washing, which is part of why they’re valuable to me, but they will be given the opportunity to reconsider their recent poor choices and dedicate themselves to my service anew. They’ve been captured already, you know. My people are everywhere, and we saw Howlaa in her bodyguard disguise. My forces moved on them as soon as you came into the restaurant.”
Crappo. “Okay. You want to make a deal? Fine. I get my Dad back, and you have to set Wisp and Howlaa free, let them out of their contract, sign an emancipation proclamation, whatever. Send them wherever they want to go.”
“Ah!” The Regent said. “I see. You’re under the misapprehension that this is a negotiation. It is not. You will accept my offer. Period.”
“Punching you. Into space. That’s my offer. Of course this is a negotiation.”
“Your father is here, Miranda. In the kitchen, with a sous chef and a saucier. One of them is simply a humble cook. The other is one of my agents. He will put a knife into your father’s kidneys as soon as he gets the order from me through his little earpiece. Really, Miranda. Your father’s a good cook, but he’s not so good I won’t use him as a hostage.”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “Let me see him. Let me see that he’s here, and that he’s all right, and I’ll do what you want.”
The Regent cocked his head.
“You said you’re a reasonable man. So be reasonable.”
“Fair enough. Come.” He rose and headed for the door, and I resisted the temptation to punch him into the center of the frozen sun – if Templeton was right, I could control destinations now, but who knew what would happen to Dad if the Regent disappeared? He gestured for me to open the door, and stepped out after me. I was amazed – the whole restaurant was empty, all the diners hustled out during the time I’d been in the dining room. Unless maybe they’d all been undercover spies for the Regent, just pretending to have lunch. I was beginning to get some idea of how powerful this guy really was. “Just through here.” The Regent nodded to the kitchen.
“I suppose this means I’ve lost a number of my best-trained troops?” he said. “I warned them not to underestimate your capabilities. The next wave will be more cautious, at least.”
Howlaa growled and lashed out...
And her claws passed harmlessly through the Regent, who rippled like a flag in the breeze.
“A hologram,” Wisp said, suddenly hovering beside me, and I realized that I couldn’t have punched the Regent into the sun even if I’d wanted to – he was just a projection again. The guy was smart, you had to give him that.
Howlaa snarled, and I looked at the kitchen door longingly. Was my Dad back there? Was he okay?
“Miranda, we have to go,” Wisp said.
“If you leave with them, I will have your father killed,” the Regent said.
It was almost enough to make me bow my head... but instead I looked into his simulated eyes. “If you hurt him, if you touch him, I’ll never let you have this jump-engine.” I slammed my fist down on a table, and sent it – away, far, as far as I could reach, which I thought was very far. I stalked forward, bringing my fist down on the bar, and it winked out of existence, the pitchers and glasses that had been resting on it crashing to the floor and shattering. “I’ll send everything in your city away. Everything. You like hoarding things? I’ll empty your whole world. You can run your snatch-engines full-speed to try to get that stuff back, but I’ll drop this shit into black holes, into the middle of stars. Your palace is next.”
The Regent shook his head and smiled like I was a two year old throwing a tantrum. “Miranda, please, just a moment ago we were being so reasonable –”
