by Andrew Post
“You’re to leave tonight?” he said, blinking and shaking his head.
“Yeah.” She added inwardly, “Hopefully they’re punctual.”
“You really want out of here, don’t you?” Flam teased.
“I believe I’ll miss it, actually,” Nula said with a sigh. “Dealing with some family stuff right now.”
“Everything okay?”
“Eh, yeah.”
He let it drop.
At the intersection, the row of Patrol vehicles split off, each to its own route. Nula stopped for the Gwork traffic director, waiting for the whistle and wave of a webbed hand. As they passed, he pinched the bill of his flat cap in greeting, a fellow officer. Flam returned the gesture.
They continued on to Armand Avenue, which terminated at Fourth Circle Street, like all the spoke streets that fanned out from the town square. From there, Flam and Nula began their rounds in earnest—each watching out opposite sides of the vehicle.
Like every other time, they didn’t see anything. Flam wondered if nefarious activity in Geyser was really that rare or if the ones doing it just knew the Patrol schedule that well. He imagined them watching the clock, closing up shop a few minutes before nightly patrols, and reopening again at ten after.
Well, he knew that’s how it worked. As a transporter and accumulator of stock, he’d liberated gently used items from their owners to give them new homes in exchange for his fee. He’d never had a stand, but he knew a couple of guys who ran carts in the square. Aksel and Ricky were two of the better-known traveling salesmen. Flam often wondered what came of those two, who hadn’t returned from the refugee camp with the others.
Nula drove them past the elevator station in the residential district across the street from the haberdashery. It immediately brought to mind when he and Pasty, newly acquainted, were on the run. Felt longer than just over a year ago. If fun made time fly, boredom made it crash.
“Tell me more about that,” Nula said.
Flam raised his chin off his fist. “Tell you more . . . about what?”
“Oh, sorry. I just meant about how you and Clyde and Nevele saved the city.”
“Aren’t you sick of those stories yet?”
“Not at all. Wish I could’ve been there. I’d like even more to be working with him now on whatever’s going on at the palace,” Nula said, focused on the road. “Give any more thought to what I said?”
“Some. But it’s not that easy.” He didn’t want to talk about that anymore. If Pasty wanted his help, he would’ve asked. Flam thought aloud, “I think how I screwed things up made him think I was unstable, even though it wasn’t my fault.”
“What do you mean?”
They were just about ready to go into the mines. Their road lay ahead. Rag Doll, Pasty, the Chatty Mouse Consortium, and Flam. It already would’ve been a tough climb, certainly—up through the city’s stone stem, into the mines with the Blatta—but then it had to go and get harder. Vidurkis hit him with that Meech-damned fabrick of his, that gray light. It seeped into him, little by little, like a poison of the mind, trickling and pooling drip by drip. For all that it enveloped him, it allowed Flam little snaps of clarity. Like when he belted Pasty across the face. Oh, the look on his face—such shock and betrayal—as he lay there on the ground, touching his hand to his lip and seeing it bloody. The blood Flam—and no one else—had drawn.
“I hurt him.”
“But if it’s like you said, then that wasn’t your fault. I’m sure if you just asked, Clyde would let you work with him in the palace. And maybe you could recommend me as your partner.”
“Okay, maybe I will.” Flam felt himself clamming up. Realizing he was actually having this conversation and not just imagining it, he shook his head, dizzy a moment.
He looked at Nula’s profile. Through the narrow opening at the front of the helmet, he could see only the tip of her nose.
Apparently able to feel him looking, she glanced his way, did a double-take. “What?”
“Did we really just . . . ?”
“Just what?”
“Say all that.”
Nula swung her gaze between the road and him. “What are you talking about?”
“Just now.”
“About my trip?”
“No, about Clyde. And me working in the palace with him.”
Nula laughed a Nula laugh. “I think someone’s in need of a nap.”
Flam tipped his helmet back off his quilled brow. “Maybe you’re right.” In his lingering loopiness, he decided to use it as a way to be bold. Be bold was, after all, tenet two of the Guardsman’s Code.
“Think I could see you off, when you leave?” he said.
“Uh, actually, I’m not sure that’s such a—” Gasping, she crushed the brake pedal.
If it hadn’t been for his harness, Flam’s horns would’ve bonked the dashboard. “Meech’s sake, Nula. You could’ve just said no.”
She pointed ahead.
A Mouflon in a tatty loincloth in the middle of Fourth Circle Street shouted at scared passersby. His fur was matted and caked with dirt, and even though he was brandishing no weapon, people gave him a wide berth.
“Had to be right at quitting time, didn’t it?” Nula reached down to make sure her sword belt was securely fastened before getting out.
“Don’t. I know him.”
The ancient Mouflon shook his fists over his overgrown bramble of horns, spewing his ravings at the top of his weathered voice. Flam and Nula slowly approached Greenspire.
“Uncle? It’s me. Could you turn around for us?”
“He’s your uncle?” Nula whispered.
Greenspire, shifting about a few degrees at a time, leading with his left ear closed in on the voices’ sources, flaring his considerable nostrils again and again. He faced his nephew finally, rheumy eyes in a silver-streaked face. “Well? What is it? I’m busy.”
“Uncle, it’s me.”
“I’m aware. I can smell it’s you, even with you still wearing those man clothes. Leave me.”
“Maybe after we get you out of the road, huh?”
Greenspire and the Lulomba and their trained Blatta had gone from squatting in the palace’s long-unused stables to occupying a section on the edge of the residential ward. The expulsion from the palace hadn’t been Clyde’s call but Flam’s. The Blatta were territorial creatures, and whenever any of the palace’s staff so much as walked past, they’d nearly relieve them of a limb. Their keepers and wranglers, the Lulomba, weren’t much more welcoming.
So an old auto-body garage, where the owner had gotten behind on paying the lease, became the palace’s property. Not an idyllic cottage in the woods, by any stretch, but home enough. Even though it wasn’t official—nothing had been signed by Greenspire or the Lulomba—Flam had seen to it that they’d be safe there, close to his own apartment so he could check in easily and near enough to the elevators so if they wished to return to the Kobbal Mines, they could at their leisure. Flam often hoped they would, especially since Greenspire tended to cause a scene like this at least every few weeks.
“He’s insane,” Nula said.
Flam turned to her. For a moment any crush he may’ve had evaporated in a misty pink puff. “He’s my family. My only family.”
“Sorry,” she said, looking surprised at his sudden sternness.
They toed up to Greenspire as the old Mouflon continued to verbally accost someone else he detected nearby.
“You there! Spoiled, bloated sack of avarice! U’chanae. Heed my warning. The crusher of men will come and create disharmony in your life—a much-needed disharmony. You will be spared but only if you change your craven ways! U’chanae, u’chanae, bzzt!”
“What’s the crusher of men?” Nula said out of the corner of her mouth.
“It’s . . . a long story. One that probably shouldn’t be common knowledge. Might make people nervous.”
That thing. Half-bug, half-human baby. A year old now but already scuttling about on it
s own. Green and purple as a Blatta but with unsettling compound eyes. Unlike the Blatta, the crusher of men could mimic human speech well beyond the shrill, painfully human-sounding screams of its genetic cousins. Sometimes Flam thought it wasn’t just parroting but actually knew what it was saying, learning Common piecemeal from Greenspire and from Flam himself when he dared speak to it, despite the creeps the critter gave him.
“Uncle? Let’s go home, yeah? People are trying to get somewhere.”
“Leave me alone,” Greenspire huffed. “I was getting somewhere. Bzzt.” He was still combining Common with the Lulomba language, Flam couldn’t help but notice. Bzzt, he’d learned, was spoken punctuation, a combination exclamation point and footnote of I adamantly stand behind the preceding statement.
From his left, Flam heard a shop door open followed by the thump of rubber wheels coming down off the curb. Without looking their way, Flam said, “If you could, at your convenience, please leave the area—we’re in the middle of something right now. Sorry for the trouble.”
In his peripheral vision, Flam saw a man. “No trouble, lad, other than yer addressin’ me like I’m a stupid arse.”
Flam recognized the voice and the speaker’s way with words.
Nigel Wigglesby.
His long, ropey arms were corded with muscle and festooned with tattoos, and his molting parrot perched on his shoulder. Crystal teeth flashed beneath his finely oiled moustache. His wheelchair hummed directly toward the chanting Mouflon, and without hesitation, he backhanded his flank. “Oy. Making another hubbub, are we?”
Greenspire spun about, walking stick hoisted and ready to bludgeon. But after he took a sniff, tension melted from him.
The two old friends exchanged some hushed words, too far away for Flam to make them out. Chin down, the old Mouflon nodded as Nigel spoke, appearing almost embarrassed, and before long they were moving out of the road together.
Some jerk applauded. Traffic resumed.
As they moved on, Nigel waved over his shoulder, a cue to Flam he had it under control and would see Greenspire home. Flam watched the ex-miner guide his stooped uncle down the sidewalk. Just as Flam got back into the vehicle and Nula started the engine, the eight thirty bell tolled.
“Sorry about that,” Flam said.
“Not your fault.” Nula dropped the vehicle into gear. “Happens. That was Nigel, though, right? Nigel Wigglesby?”
“One and only.”
When they passed Nigel and Greenspire, Flam watched the idling pair from the vehicle’s side mirror until the bend of Fourth Circle Street pulled them from view. They were laughing, like the old chums they were. The sight made Flam miss Clyde all the more.
“So that was the last bell,” Nula said, snapping Flam back to the present, “and that means it’s not only Friday; it’s Friday at quittin’ time.”
While stopped at the next intersection, she took off her helmet, shook out her hair, and made a show of tossing the “brain bucket” into the backseat.
Flam’s smile matched hers.
But as she returned her gaze to the road, Flam noticed something. She had this little white swipe on her cheek. Like someone at the station had played a prank on her by putting foot powder in her helmet—which wouldn’t have been surprising. Lighthearted hazing of the greenhorns was routine.
“You’ve got something . . .” Flam reached over to clear the smudge with his finger.
She recoiled, crushing herself against the driver’s side door. He’d never seen her look so repulsed.
“It’s okay. You’ve just got something here.” He pointed at his own face approximately where the blotch was on hers.
Behind them a horn blared, joining the annoyed traffic director’s whistle peals. After moving them forward, she took a hand from the wheel and delicately touched the spot on her cheek. When she brought her finger away, the spot hadn’t left—but had grown. On her fingertip: a tiny pink mesa. Rendering it to a comma on her uniform trouser leg, she threw the blinker with a frustrated swat and swung them down Armand Avenue.
“Where’re we going?” Flam said. “This isn’t the way back. Nula, I’m sorry if I offended you somehow, but what sort of gentleman would I be if I let you walk around unaware you had something on her face?”
That white dash on her cheek. Connections began surfacing for Flam but were slowed by his disbelief.
Turning in behind the tannery, Nula parked them out of view of the road. She cut the engine, undid her harness, and turned to face him, her expression giving away nothing.
“I tried my best to avoid this,” she said.
“What do you mean? I don’t care if you’re really that pale. Clyde’s pale as can be. Plummets, I even call him Pasty he’s so—” Sudden cold doused him, his heart’s fifteen valves chugging.
A car turned on the road in the distance, its lights sweeping the inside of their vehicle. As the blue-white glare struck Nula’s face, her gold-flecked hazel eyes cast a weird reflective shine. Like those of a taxidermy animal. Like glass.
“Who are you?”
Before she could answer, the dispatch on the radio blared, startling him. “Guardsmen, full alert. The Odium have attacked a commercial frigate. Please return to the station for orders. All hands. This is not a drill.” When the call began to cycle, Nula turned the radio down until it was only a faint, panicked hum.
“You’re Moira Pyne.”
A small nod.
“What’re you doing going by a different name, pretending to be a guardswoman? Clyde’s been looking all over for you and your brothers—”
“And we’ve been looking for him.”
“I don’t think I understand. It’s not like he’s made it particularly hard.”
“No? Then how can you, his best friend, not know where he is? He’s not in the city. Nor does anyone know when he’s due to return. So where is he?”
“I told you. I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything—”
She drew her side sword, the metallic scrape loud in such tight confines.
Eyes he’d once dreamed about staring into beachside grew apologetic.
Hands he’d wanted to hold on a long walk anywhere, everywhere, rested a blade across her lap, patient and capable.
With a voice he wanted to hear greet him in the morning, not in the office but from the other side of his bed, a voice he wanted to hear saying the Promise under the eyes of Meech, she said instead, “Flam, tell me where Clyde is and I’ll let you leave this vehicle with your life.”
CHAPTER 10
Indecision Kills
Give me my weapon, mister,” Emer whispered. He focused on the hill, a palm opening and closing toward Clyde.
One crawler tasted the air with its forked tongue, its slit pupils estimating them.
“We can handle this,” Clyde said, drawing Commencement slowly, quietly. “We don’t need to use guns for this.”
“Ya thick? We’re gonna die unless I can chase the others off by puttin’ down the buck—but only if you let me.” If he’d been more mobile, the boy likely would’ve taken the gun back by force.
“Use the harpoon.”
“Seriously?” He shook the sky-whale-killing tool at Clyde. “This thing against them?”
Clyde swallowed. “We need to live by example.”
“Perhaps you should listen to the bumpkin, Mr. Clyde,” Rohm said. “I’d sooner trust his skills with a gun than yours with a sword.”
“I’ve had lessons.”
“From a man who admitted he knew how to merely make swords, not use them, and accepted only pub tokens as payment. You’re not likely to dazzle a hungry lizard into submission with your sense of honor, Mr. Clyde. The only thing you’ll get—as Emer would put it—is eht.”
He hated doing it, but right then it seemed a necessary thing. Clyde freed the clunky antique from his belt and tossed it over.
Catching it, keeping one hand on the harpoon for stability, one eye closed and tongue poking out for added accuracy, Emer
fired.
The lizard, presumably the buck, was struck between the eyes. But by some remarkable bit of evolution, not even a bullet could penetrate its scaly flesh. Clyde could see the flash of sparks of bullet connecting with organic armor, the spack startling the other crawlers into fleeing.
The crawler issued a menacing hiss and pitched itself down the hill. Thick arms ending in long claws spun, throwing sand as it drew an angry streak in the sand right toward them.
Emer shot again.
It kept coming, roaring.
Then, when it was scarcely a stride off, another. And another and another.
The crawler, gurgling, finally succumbed to its wounds at Emer’s feet.
On the hill, the cactus patch rustled, shadows shifted, and the Lakebed’s silence returned.
Emer lowered the gun and wheeled toward Clyde. “That was dumb as hell, mister. Ya think ya was gonna stand a chance ’gainst that thing with a sword?” Shaking his head, Emer sighed, his visible breath in the cool air mingling with the acrid gun smoke. He took a step back from the dead lizard. “That was too damn close.”
“I’m sorry, okay?” Clyde sheathed Commencement. “I misjudged the situation.”
“I’ll say.”
Rohm pointed. “There’s Nevele.”
The whoosh of sand swallowed them. Clyde dropped his goggles over his eyes. Despite the grit stinging his face and fear still racing, he couldn’t suppress a smile. The starship was a welcome sight.
The moment the two coordinates matched, Aksel cut the Praise to Her’s engines, lowered the landing gear, and set them down.
Nevele was at the hatch and tugging it open before the ship had completed its postflight venting. “Hold on a second,” Aksel shouted, going unheard as she, apparently deaf with excitement, hopped down. Turning back to the console, Aksel watched the vidscreens as one geometric estimation of a human mapped by the nav systems raced toward a second and both collided in an embrace.
I helped that happen. Retiring from working for his most recent employers was already showing its benefits.
