by Taven Moore
“You would be correct! Those recipes were terribly unbalanced on a macro-nutrient level.” Remora leaned forward, voice lowered. “You may not realize it, but those recipes are comprised almost entirely from flour and sugar! Even the fruited ones add a preposterous amount of extra sweetener. Human dietary needs skew much farther toward protein and vegetable sources. Clearly, the recipes were in desperate need of correction, so I altered them. For balance, you see.”
“For balance,” the Shinra’ere warrior repeated weakly.
A high-pitched chittering sounded, followed by the familiar, flat translation of Montgomery’s craft. “These are revolting, Remora. I would not feed them to my enemies.”
Remora’s jaw dropped. “That . . . that can’t possibly be true! I measured the nutrients very carefully and threw away every burned or undercooked specimen!”
Hank’s eyes narrowed. Something she’d said a moment before blossomed into full realization. “Wait a tick. Did you just say you ‘ran out’ of protein?”
She froze, eyes wide in as clear an expression of guilt as he’d ever seen.
No. Impossible. Hank kicked back his stool and marched to the tiny shipboard kitchen pantry.
Throwing the doors wide, Hank froze. Anarchy met his eyes. Open, unwashed tins careened across crumb-strewn surfaces. Half-open boxes of dry goods spilled their contents onto the shelves. Shards of now-stale crisps littered every surface, shrapnel from bag explosions in some hellish food war.
Hank stood for a moment, completely and totally undone by the chaos that had, not one week before, been a fully stocked and carefully organized cupboard.
He took a deep breath and counted down from ten. With painful slowness, he closed the pantry doors, shutting away the horrors within.
“Remora?” he asked, not turning around.
“Yes?” she replied, her voice tiny.
He took another breath. Five months and two weeks. Five months and two weeks.
“I am going to ask you to never open these doors again,” he said.
“But how will I learn to cook?” she protested.
Jinn made a sound somewhere between a cough and a choke. Hackwrench, never one to stand on ceremony, began laughing outright, his ship translating the shrill chitters into a flat, mechanical, “Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“This,” Hank said quietly, “is the part where you say, ‘Yes, Hank. I will never open the food cupboard doors again.’”
“But you were the one who said I couldn’t have a cook—” she began.
He interrupted. “Jinn, can you cook?”
“I can,” replied the Shinra’ere. Hank imagined the man was willing to agree to just about anything so long as it meant he didn’t have to eat another one of Remora’s muffins.
“Excellent. Now you have a cook, Remora. Say it.”
“But—”
“Say. It.”
She sighed heavily. He imagined her lower lip pouting and her arms crossed over her chest. She’d single-handedly managed to destroy four months worth of food stores in one cooking spree. It didn’t matter how much money she had: he couldn’t produce edible food from salt water and sea air. If they were going to leave port, he needed to be sure their food stores were safe.
“Very well,” she said.
“Say it.”
“You can’t possibly intend for me to repeat that whole ridiculous sentence.”
Hank waited.
“You are a uniquely obstinate man, has anyone ever told you that?” She sputtered. “Very well. Yes, Hank, I will never open the pantry doors again. Are you happy?”
“Thrilled. Bones, you listening?”
“Yes, Captain.” Bones’s voice sounded from the copper speaking tube in the corner of the room.
“I thought you might be. Set a course for the nearest city. You and I will continue as planned and retrieve the Hawks while Remora and her new cook replenish our food supplies.”
“Oh dear,” said Remora. “That will delay our arrival in Bespin, will it not?”
Hank turned a glare on her that had caused hardened pirates to regret their words. Lady Remora Windgates Price was made of sterner stuff. She took only a single, very small, step backward.
“Saving time to reduce the delay,” he answered, “is one reason we are splitting up.”
“And the other reason?” she asked tentatively.
“So that I do not murder you,” he said, then walked out of the kitchen.
10. Helion
It seemed Remora’s feet had only just touched the salt-scored wood of the Helion dock before Hank childishly turned the Miraj round and sped off, sails unfurling as if impatient to be away from them.
Remora watched the ship disappear, some part of her yearning to call out and request that it return. The dull, unmoving wood of the dock felt unpleasant beneath her boots. She’d read about the phenomenon. “Sea legs,” the Ardelan Encyclopedia had called it. At the time, she’d wondered how anyone could feel as if solid ground were heaving and buckling. Now all she wanted was to be back aboard the ship, where the wood beneath her feet seemed almost to be alive and breathing.
Jinn was scant comfort. Had the black-wrapped warrior been a smaller, more nervous sort of man, she might have called his current behavior “timid.” Assigning such a mundane term to the Shinra’ere warrior seemed out of place, yet she could find no better description for his silent and incessant pacing, nor the line between his brows that had not disappeared since he learned that Helion was their destination.
She would not be so rude as to call attention to his behavior and he seemed unwilling to discuss it. She had hoped to take this opportunity to get to know the man better, but at this rate, she might well have been alone save for a particularly tall and muscular shadow.
The sunlight beat down upon them stifling force and Remora sighed. Groceries were certainly not going to purchase themselves.
Remora lifted her parasol, pushing it open and settling it against her shoulder. “Well then,” she said to the air, as Jinn was clearly not listening, “one presumes the marketplace is in this direction.”
She strode forward and Jinn followed. The man was twitchy as a cat in a room full of dogs. She could not fathom it. The entire city of Helion was under Shinra rule. This should be near a homecoming for him, yet he acted as if it were a misery.
Helion itself was beautiful enough to distract her from Jinn’s nervousness. The port city rose from the desert sands like a tooth thrust through soft fabric. The walls, buildings, and even the streets themselves were constructed primarily of gleaming white limestone. Emphasized by the starkness of its surroundings, ornate rooftops blazed with color. Here, a building was capped with a complex pattern of colored clay shingles. Its neighbor had a low, flat roof with a furnished veranda. The next building sported billowing cloth canopies in rich jewel tones.
Punctuating every corner of every building, it seemed, golden gargoyles hissed, scowled, or glared down at passers-by. She found the intentionally hideous statues disconcerting. Must every statue be a horned, winged, serpent-fanged nightmare? They seemed almost out of place in such opulent and beautiful surroundings.
Unsettled, Remora’s steps slowed and she paid more attention to the opulent city. Something else, something other than the gargoyles, bothered her.
It wasn’t until she saw a horse-dresl woman carrying a basket of turnips that Remora could put her finger on the most unsettling thing about Helion.
There were no plants. No cheerful flowers in boxes underlined curtained windows. No artfully trimmed hedges in pots dotted stone verandas. Swaying gaslamps on limestone armatures dotted the thoroughfare where tall trees would have been in her home city. Not so much as a single blade of grass could be seen.
Remora moved a step closer to Jinn. The lack of plant-life seemed unaccountably eerie, even given the city’s desert location.
The people of Helion were almost universally dresl, of course. The Shinra and the half-animal dresl shared an alliance that ev
en her expensive Ardelan Encyclopedias had not been able to explain.
Not much was known about the secretive Shinra race. Humans were allowed only in port cities, and even then only as guests. The Shinra chose not to discuss themselves and the dresl could not speak with their animal throats and mouths even if they wanted to.
Watching the dresl go about their business, Remora wondered how they did manage to communicate. Certainly, they had to speak with the Shinra and with each other. They might share physical aspects with animals, but they wore human clothing and walked upright on their hind legs. Surely they were of human intelligence.
There was, of course, one obvious way to find out. Remora stopped the next dresl walking past, a well-muscled horse-headed man carrying a bundle of sheepskins. “Pardon my interruption, but is this the way to the market?” she asked, gesturing the direction she had been walking.
The dresl’s mild brown eyes blinked, ears swiveling forward to catch her question. He nodded and pointed a hoof-tipped finger in the same direction they had been heading.
Remora smiled at him. “Thank you very much, that is quite helpful.”
The horse-man snorted once, the sort of mild whuffle she often heard from her carriage horses back home.
Behind her, Jinn moved. “You need not ask directions, Lady. I know—”
Catching sight of the Shinra’ere for the first time, the dresl’s eyes rolled back and showed their whites. Tossing his head and pinning his ears back, the muscular dresl fairly leaped backward, dropping his bundle in his haste to be away from them.
The line between Jinn’s eyes deepened and his lips pulled into a pained grimace.
“Jinn, what is—?” Remora began.
Her bodyguard interrupted her, the first time she could recall him ever doing so. “We should keep moving,” he said tersely, pointedly not looking at the horse-man, whose fur visibly twitched, nostrils flared.
For the sake of the clearly distraught dresl, she followed Jinn’s advice and walked swiftly up the street, anxiously spinning her parasol in her hands.
As soon as she judged them to be out of earshot, she scowled at her bodyguard. “Jinn. Thrice, aboard the Miraj, you asked that we not come to Helion and thrice I was rebuffed when I requested reason to change our destination. Pressing the matter may not be ladylike, but it would seem that your presence here is particularly unwelcome. I believe you are in possession of insight as to why that might be.”
Jinn remained stoic. “I do not believe the answer you seek will hinder the intent of our visit, Miss Gates.”
Remora stopped and put a hand on his wrapped arm. “It is not the fate of our groceries which so concerns me.”
Jinn’s red eyes closed briefly. Almost, she regretted asking him. The look on his face as the dresl backed away from them had been terrible. He had reacted as though the dresl had slapped him.
No, more disturbing than that: he’d reacted as though he deserved such a slap.
“I do not know how to explain.” He gritted his teeth, eyes on the road, or the wall, or the sky—anywhere but her face. “I am no longer Shinra,” he said, finally, as though that explained everything.
“I do not know what that means,” Remora said, brow furrowed.
A new voice spoke up, sharp as flint. “It means he has no family. It means he can never return to his home clan because even his mother, his father, and his brother would kill him on sight. It means he’s a godless, damned traitor.”
11. Ally
Remora looked up to see another Shinra’ere leaning against a nearby wall, skin the same slate gray as Jinn’s and eyes just as red. Where Jinn’s wrappings were black, this other Shinra wore pure white bindings. The tassel dangling from the hilt of her weapon was tied with a different knotting pattern than Jinn’s and was red where his was yellow.
Once again, Remora cursed the tight-lipped entries on the Shinra’ere found within the pages of her Ardelan Encyclopedia. Surely those differences in color meant something, but she felt certain that it was an inappropriate time to inquire about them.
“Nolan,” said Jinn, voice even and unsurprised.
“You’re back sooner than expected,” the new Shinra’ere said.
Remora’s eyebrows rose. Back? So Jinn had been here before?
“I am not here for that. It is not yet time,” replied Jinn, shooting a warning glance to Remora.
The new Shinra’ere followed the glance to Remora, red eyes assessing her only momentarily before clearly dismissing her. Remora wasn’t sure if she should be insulted or relieved.
“That doesn’t matter. There’s been a problem with . . .” a quick glance to Remora “. . . the package.”
Immediately, Jinn animated, straightening his posture and dropping his hands to his side, one hand brushing against the yellow tassel attached to his arcblade’s hilt. “What problem?” he asked.
Nolan stiffened. “Stand down, Jinn. We have known each other a long time, but this is my territory and you are Exile.”
With visible effort, Jinn relaxed, crossing his arms over his chest. Nolan nodded. “I take a risk even speaking to you. You are here overnight?” she asked.
Jinn dropped his chin.
“Good. Seek a room at the Lion’s Pride. I’ll be in contact.”
Nolan took a step away, then paused, looking back. “Lose the human. Bad enough that you came back at all, let alone with a dirtsider.”
Dirtsider? A terribly derogatory term to apply to someone she hadn’t even bothered to greet!
“I cannot,” said Jinn, voice level. “She is my charge.”
Nolan’s eyes narrowed. “You are a sell-sword now? A sell-sword to dirtsiders?”
Jinn said nothing.
Nolan curled her lip and spat once to the side. “Your brother is not worth a handful of living earth, let alone all you sacrifice for him. By the Mark, he will be the death of you in truth one of these days, Jinn.”
With that, she was gone.
Remora shook the folds of her skirt, dislodging a few specks of sand. “I must say, Jinn, I do not much care for your friends.”
“She risks much for me,” he said, and no more, despite several plaintive looks cast in his direction as they continued their stroll to the marketplace. Truly, the man kept his thoughts to himself more than any other being she had ever met! She would almost have preferred the company of McCoy over this brooding silence.
Remora adjusted her parasol and forced her lips into a smile. She would not allow Jinn’s sullen attitude to spoil what might be her only trip to a Shinra city. Nor, for that matter, would she allow Nolan’s rudeness to darken such a wonderfully sunny day.
A tantalizing smell met her nose, yeasty and sweet. Pastries from some nearby vendor? Surely so! That would be just the thing to salvage the mood. She had never known Jinn to refuse a pastry. She could purchase a cupcake with extra sprinkles and perhaps coax a smile to his eyes.
Snapping her parasol closed, Remora turned darted up a side alley, following the scent. It couldn’t possibly be far.
“Remora, wait!” called Jinn, but Remora ignored him with dogged determination. He would no doubt try to dissuade her, but she was in no mood for it. She would have her pastry, and she would regain her gracious, if quiet, bodyguard in the process.
The alley turned a corner then stopped abruptly, no longer an alley but a wall, grayed with shadow.
She put her hands on her hips. She could have sworn the smell came from this direction. Perhaps she should have taken the next one up. No sooner had she turned to leave, than a wolf-dresl stepped from the shadows. His eye gleamed and his paw-hands curled around a rough-hewn wooden bat.
She did not like the way he was eyeing her. She glanced around, stomach dropping as she realized her ploy to outrun Jinn had been more effective than she had intended. She was alone, in a strange city, confronted by an armed stranger.
Though, of course, that might be a somewhat hasty assumption. Perhaps the dresl was as lost as she. “Do pa
rdon me, I seem to have lost my way,” she said with a smile, making as if to step around him.
He gestured with a paw-like hand. Two more dresl stepped from the shadows, a sinuous cat-man and a powerfully built bull-man. Both were armed and neither looked particularly like a pastry vendor.
Remora gave a nervous laugh and slipped her hand into her skirt pocket, where her tiny derringer was.
Her heart froze. Where her derringer used to be.
Her hand fumbled through the folds of her skirt, but the familiar weight of the little gun was nowhere to be found.
The cat took a step forward and held out his hand. There, on the thick paw-pad of his palm, was her gun, pearl-inlaid handle and all.
“Why, that’s my gun! Where did you get it?” she asked, amazed. Could she possibly have dropped it?
The cat began to choke. It wasn’t until the wolf started huffing that she realized the odd sounds they were making were laughter.
Remora knotted her hands in her skirts. It was becoming increasingly obvious that these dresl were not here to forge a friendship.
More desperately this time, she looked around. Smooth limestone walls rose on all sides. No handholds for climbing, even if she felt she could accomplish such a feat. No doorways for ducking into or debris to launch toward them as weaponry.
The bull-man strode forward, nostrils flaring. He gestured at her, his hoof-like fingers opening and closing in a pattern.
She took a step back, feeling the cold stone of the wall press into her back. “I . . . what is it you want?” she asked, throat dry.
The bull-man repeated the gestures, more sharply this time. She stared dumbly at him. The wolf-man yipped once, then gestured in a different pattern. The bull-man snorted and gestured in return.
Speech. The hand gestures were speech.
For a moment, Remora’s enchantment at a language made entirely of hand gestures so consumed her she quite forgot her situation.
