by S. R. Witt
“I don’t do that. I’m a killer, not a babysitter.” He gave us a fierce smile that showed more gaps than teeth.
I wondered how many fights Havelock had survived. More importantly, how many more would he survive before dropping dead on us?
“I guess we’re wasting our time here.” I pushed my chair back from the table.
The bluff worked. The gnome groaned and surrendered. “Fine, I need to work. My last job didn’t go so well, and I still haven’t recovered. Got a priest on this one?”
Indira smiled. “That’s your job. You’ll be keeping him safe.”
The gnome balked at this, for a moment, then nodded. “You’re lucky I need the money, or I’d never agree to this.”
I wondered if he understood how much that was true for the rest of us. “It’s settled then. You might want to check in with our priest before we head out tomorrow morning so he can patch you up before we get on the road.”
The gnome nodded, then cast a fearful glance toward Indira. “One last condition.”
All this negotiating was wearing me out, but I didn’t feel like fighting. “Name it.”
“I never get left alone with her,” he said pointing one stunted finger at Indira. “That’s the deal. No exceptions.”
“Done,” I said.
Indira opened her mouth to protest, but I cut her off. “There’s no point fighting about this. The guy won’t come if he thinks you’re going to set him on fire or pluck his eyes out, so we’ll just keep the two of you apart. Shouldn’t be hard.”
I gave the gnome directions to Cringer’s place, and we got up to leave the table. The gnome visibly relaxed when Indira stopped staring at him. “I’ll see your priest, and the rest of you, tomorrow.”
We left the tavern with Indira fuming beside me. “This is a terrible idea.”
I trailed her out of the tavern and grabbed her arm when we reach the street. “What is your problem? This is your guy.”
She stopped and jabbed a sharp fingernail into my chin. “He is not my anything. I just thought he’d be right for the job. Now I’m starting to regret that decision.”
Strangling her wouldn’t accomplish anything, so I satisfied myself with an exasperated groan. “You picked him! Why are you such a pain in my ass about it now?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “It’s complicated.”
“How complicated could it be?” I threw up my hands in frustration and Indira stomped away from me.
She was half a block away when she turned around and flipped me off. “He’s my ex-husband, you idiot.”
This just got better all the time.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
You don’t get very many perfect days in your life. Most days, even those landmark dates we’re all told will be picture-perfect fairytale moments, don’t go as planned.
My cousin got married on a spring day with weather so perfect it was almost surreal. The sun shone from the sky, the birds sang in the trees, and there wasn’t a rain cloud in the sky. A gentle breeze carried the perfume of nearby honeysuckle vines to the wedding party, and we all settled into our comfortable chairs to witness the happy union between two people we all loved.
Beautiful day, right?
Except one of the caterers didn’t put the potato salad away, and the fried chicken was tainted with salmonella. All of us, every single person at the wedding, ended up so sick we were fighting for priority toilet seating for days.
That day should have taught me nothing ever works out the way you plan.
After recruiting Havelock, I decided to log out of the game. There wasn’t anything else to do at the moment, and wasting connect time charges was out of the question.
Our mom was stable and sleeping, so Karl and I scrounged for empty bottles around the neighborhood. It took half the day, but we ended up with two big garbage bags full of glass. We took our haul down to the recycler, and the old woman behind the counter gave us five bucks for our trouble. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to buy some shitty dinner so we wouldn’t have to choke down more peanut-butter-and-cheese sandwiches.
We bought a box of frozen pizza rolls from the bodega on the corner and nuked the shit out of them in the microwave. Zapped rolls aren’t anywhere near as tasty as fried rolls, but we didn’t have the luxury of wasting electricity and grease on that project.
The rest of that afternoon passed in a delirious haze. Karl and I stuffed soggy pastry pockets of fake cheese and synthetic meat into our pie holes. We wolfed them down like we had during better times when we were just two dumb kids who spent their afternoons playing video games.
Karl worked hard to make me laugh. He’d do this thing where he cut off the end of the pizza roll and then made it into a little puppet. He made stupid smartass jokes until the last of the pizza rolls were gone, and I laughed at every one of them.
Life was good. Or, at least, it wasn’t a complete shitshow.
We’d lined up our adventuring party, and we were ready to depart on our quest the next afternoon. Money was still tight, don’t get me wrong, and not all of our problems were fixed, but we had a plan. We were going to save Frosthold from getting taken over by a bunch of monster people, and we were going to do it in style.
I imagined we’d be heroes. People would know our names, and they’d tell stories about us after this was over.
I know, I know, it’s not the real World, but it’s real enough. Those legends would be just as valid as if they’d happened in our own history. They’d affect people. They’d make the good guys’ lives better and our enemies’ lives worse. It was a good feeling.
And it lasted for about two hours.
My cell phone rang, and my heart jumped into my throat when I saw the area code. Triple-seven numbers are reserved for government agencies and bill collectors. You see one of those numbers, and you know you’ve attracted all the wrong kinds of attention.
I interrupted one of Karl’s corny jokes. “I have to take this.”
Safe in my room, I thumbed the answer button on my phone and held it to my ear. “Hello?”
You never answer these kinds of calls with your name. If you do, that’s the same as admitting you owe whatever debt they’re trying to get their hands on. The smart money is to keep calm and don’t give them any more information to work with than you absolutely have to.
“This is number 777-TRS-TPBJ. By answering this phone, you indicate you are able and authorized to negotiate and assume responsibility for the citizen to whom this number is registered. If you are not the citizen to whom this phone number is registered, you are in violation of Federal law. Please confirm you are authorized and able to negotiate and accept all legal and financial responsibilities for the citizen to whom this number is registered.”
Debt collection had changed a lot from the old days, I guess. People got so good at dodging their lenders the government stepped in and made some changes.
Now, even cell phones are tied to physical addresses, and your telephone number is linked to your Citizen ID Number, which is what replaced the Social Security number once the immigration laws changed back in 2018. When you start tracking every person on the planet in the same system, you need a lot of numbers.
Cell phones are treated like your ID. Letting someone else use your phone is the same as letting them use your driver’s license or your insurance card. Using someone’s phone without permission is fraud and, in some cases, can land your ass in jail. Since the only way to answer a cell phone is to thumbprint the Accept Call button, your friendly neighborhood debt collector knows it was you who picked up your phone. The rest of that rigmarole is just legalese to cover the collector’s ass.
“You know it is,” I said. My experience with bill collectors since my mother got sick led me to believe they were all universally shitty. Part of the financial reforms that saved the country from shitting the bed during the Second Meltdown removed bankruptcy protections and made credit arrangements life or death struggles for survival. Whoev
er was on the other end of this call was not my friend.
“Good morning, Adam. We received reports from your financial institution that there was a significant deposit to your account in the past 30 days. Our algorithms indicate you have been blessed by a substantial financial windfall. Has someone in your family gotten a new job?”
This was not heading anywhere good. I gave the asshole on the other end of the phone the same rote response I’d given a thousand times before.
“No one here is gainfully employed. My family lives on my mother’s disability payments, and the money my brother and I can scrape together from our freelance work.”
Jobs just didn’t happen, not anymore. The on-demand economy had reclassified almost everyone as contractors or freelance expert. Pizza places didn’t hire drivers. Barista wasn’t a job, it was a qualification. When businesses needed bodies to fill work shifts, they threw up a notice on the BuzzBoards, and people bid on the hours. Most of the delivery drivers I knew made just enough keep making payments on their car, and their insurance paid up. Saying you were a freelancer or a consultant meant nothing. It was just another way for our corporate masters to shirk their duties to the people. If they could build their empires on the backs of digital slaves, they were cool with that.
Sorry about the rant, that kind of shit just pisses me off. But, I guess you already know that after what happened, right?
“Have you received any gifts recently, Adam?”
Right. Someone just gave me money. “No, I don’t know anyone with any money to spare.”
A faint hum was my only answer. There were clicks and whirs on the other end of the line to let me know my call was being transferred and bounced around from department to department while the logistical algorithms found the best person to deal me the bad news.
“Good afternoon. Our algorithms indicate you have received a substantial income increase, which means you are no longer eligible for the subsidies you have been enjoying up until now. Effective immediately, you’re section 13, section 17, section 103, and supplemental insurance benefits have all been canceled. You are responsible for paying the amounts formerly covered by these subsidies and insurance policies, which will increase your total monthly payments by—”
There was a moment of silence, which was followed by a number my brain couldn’t even process.
This is how they were going to do it. This is how they were going to make sure I never crawled out from underneath the thumb of the medical insurance companies and the bill collectors who owned my soul in exchange for keeping my mother alive. If I made more money, they’d just kill our subsidies and keep raising the debt ever higher.
My head ached. I couldn’t even speak I was so stunned.
“Have a nice day, sir. Please keep in mind that in addition to this adjustment, your payment date has been moved forward and the difference between your former and current payments is due immediately.”
The line died.
I slumped against the wall and stared at the dead phone in my hand. Stomach acid crawled up the back of my throat, and my brain felt like it was going to ooze out of my ears. How was this even possible?
“Who was that?” Karl joined me in the hallway and leaned against the opposite wall. He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at me with a mixture of concern and fear. “What’s going on?
The words wouldn’t come. I looked into my brother’s worried eyes and gave him the number.
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s our new payment amount. That’s what we owe for Mom’s insurance every month.”
Saying the words made them too real. My legs gave out, and I slid down the wall until my ass thumped onto the threadbare carpet.
Karl, sensing my distress, took a seat next to me. No matter how annoying he could be, no matter how much he drove me nuts by treating me like an idiot little brother, it was comforting to have him close. “You’re not making sense,” he said. “Why did our payments go up?”
Echoes of the phone call from the bill collector bounced around the inside of my skull like deranged squirrels looking for an escape from a trap. “We made money. They found out about it. Now they’re taking it.”
“That isn’t fair.” Karl punched his fists in the threadbare carpet. “They can’t do that.”
“They can. They did.”
“We’ll figure something out. Maybe we can become real thieves, and start robbing other adventurers.”
I swallowed a grim laugh and laid some cold facts on my brother. “If we make a little more money, they’re just going to take it. Making another 10 percent or 15 percent won't fix our problems. We need a lot of money to get ahead of them. Enough to pay off our debts and get into our own place, off the subsidies. It’s the only way.”
Karl rested his forehead on his knees. “But how? We’re tied up on this quest to stop the bad guys from taking over Frosthold. Whatever treasure we find on this one, we have to split six ways, not just two. Unless…”
Knowing Karl, I put a brake on his plan. “We’re not going to steal from those people. They’re helping us do something good, and I won’t screw them over for a one-time score. We need something bigger. We need something that will keep paying.”
“Fucking taxes,” Karl muttered. “Government always sticking their hand in your pocket.”
His words triggered something inside me. I grinned. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”
He slugged me in the arm, hard enough to leave a dull ache behind. “At least I’m not ugly.”
“No, think about what you just said. Taxes. That’s the answer.” I could see from the look on his face he still wasn’t getting it, so I spelled it out. “We’ll collect taxes. Every dollar, I mean every gold coin, that comes into Frosthold, we can take a piece of.”
“What? You’re going to get yourself elected mayor?”
My grin grew even wider. “We don’t need an election.”
Pieces of my plan fell into place, bits of information trickling down through my brain cells to coalesce into the foundations of a new way of doing things. “Look, were trying to keep someone from taking control of the Burning Throne, right?”
The lights went on in Karl’s eyes. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Dead, one hundred percent, serious. What if we didn’t just stop the bad guys from taking control of the Throne?” I couldn’t stop grinning. This idea felt so right and so obvious, I couldn’t believe it hadn’t popped into my head when I first saw the quest.
“We’ll take it for ourselves. We’ll grab the throne and claim Dominion over Frosthold.”
Karl was grinning, now, too. “This is genius. Seriously.”
My brother's praise made the plan feel right to me. We were partners now. “For once, we’ll make the rules.”
I was giddy with excitement.
Had I known what was coming, I would’ve abandoned this plan before it even got started.
But once that plan was in front of me, I couldn’t think of anything else. I’d made my choice.
And doomed us all.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Havelock refused to ride a horse. Not much taller than my knee, he danced around the horse’s hooves terrified he’d be stomped into paste.
“Nobody said anything about horses!” He hollered. “Which one of you idiots thought a gnome could ride a giant horse?”
Mercy did her best to calm him down. “It’ll be all right once you’re in the saddle. Look, I’ve shortened the stirrups. You’ll be as secure as any of the rest of us.”
The gnome glared at her. “If I fall out of that saddle, I’ll bust my head open. You giants don’t have nearly as far to fall. Someone as tall as you stumbles out of the saddle, it’s not much different than stepping out of your own bed.”
Indira watched the proceedings from her saddle, eyes narrowed to hateful slits. “This was a bad idea.”
My horse shuffled its hooves beneath me, shifting its weight from leg to l
eg and snorting with impatience to get on the road. I agreed with it, and wasn’t having a lot of fun getting jostled about every time it lifted a hoof. “It was your bad idea.”
She turned her hate in my direction, and my sympathy for Havelock increased by several notches. “We needed a fighter. I got one. But I didn’t know he was going to be such a baby.”
Mercy and Havelock were still going at it, and I wondered how long it would be before she lost her patience, tied him up, and threw him over his saddle.
The little guy was fierce, I’d give him that, but picking a fight with Mercy didn’t seem like a winning plan. “Why don’t you just cast a spell on him or something?”
Indira scoffed at my suggestion. “Do I look like an enchanter to you?”
Truth be told, she looked like any other spell flinger I’d seen in bad videos and on the covers of trashy fantasy ebooks. “I mean, you cast spells…”
She blew out an exasperated sigh. “I’m a Magi. I specialize in elemental spells, specifically elemental fire. What you’re talking about? Fiddling with someone’s brain? That’s a geas, or maybe a glamour. It’s an entirely different school of magic.”
“But you could learn it. I mean, aren’t spells like calculus or something? You just need to know the magic words, right?”
I knew I was pushing my luck, but I didn’t really care. Questioning Indira about magic was more entertaining than watching two members of my party fight over whether or not the horse was a deathtrap.
Tongues of flame rose from Indira’s eyes and blue sparks flickered in her hair. “The words help control what’s already inside you. They guide and direct the energy you channel. It’s like…” She struggled with the words for a moment, before continuing. “Okay, let’s try it this way. You know how wi-fi works, right? There’s a field of data just floating around. It’s always there, being transmitted from whatever node is broadcasting. But you can’t do anything with that data if you don’t know the network password.”
“That makes sense, I guess.” It wasn’t really sinking in, and I suddenly realized I’d encouraged Indira to go off the deep end with her magical theories and lectures. “Thanks for explaining that.”
