by eden Hudson
Het took the smooth dirt path right up to the door and went inside without knocking or announcing himself.
I waited.
Het poked his head out. “I thought you was comin’.”
“Did you wake Miss Re up?” I asked.
“I told you she ain’t in.”
“At all?”
“Not a-tall.”
I stepped up to the door, felt around along the inside and top of the jamb. No immediately obvious booby traps. The majority of the interior was hidden in shadows, but a window cut high into the opposite wall let in enough moonlight to get a partial view of the dirt floor. Smooth. No central fire pit. I stepped inside. Slowly, my eyes adjusted. Gnarled wooden posts set at uneven spaces along the walls kept the rusty tin from falling in. An army of dry bones and little cloth bags the size of one of Het’s chubby fists hung from the ceiling on leather cords.
Bet Carina would’ve thought twice about trading off her catfish head to the witch if she could’ve seen that.
“You can leave the offerin’ over there,” Het said, pointing at a corner. “Jus’ sit it on the stone.”
I didn’t see what stone he was talking about until I got closer. It was blacker than night and swallowed by the shadows, but when viewed from the right angle, its surface shined like water. I crouched to set my lock tools on the stone, then stood up straight.
“When’s Miss Re coming back?” I asked Het, scanning the room.
He shrugged. “Might be tomorrow. She says she ’preciates the offerin’, though, and you come on back when it gits to be too much. She’ll teach you somethin’ neat.”
The only bones I could see were hanging from the ceiling. Except for the stone in the corner and the dangling decorations, Re Suli kept a clean and empty shack.
“Does she teach you anything, Het?”
“Oh, sure.” He flashed those canine-less teeth in a wide smile. “I learnt plenty already.”
Out the window, a flash of white caught my eye.
“That’s great,” I said. “Well, we better get going.”
“Miss Re says again, you make sure you come on back when it gits too much. She says don’t forgit it.”
“I’ll remember.”
When Het turned his back on me to open the door, I swiped my lock tools and stuck them back into my pocket. I followed Het outside, then stopped.
“Het, bubba, I have to take a leak,” I said, gesturing toward the side of the house. “You mind finding something to do out front here? It’ll just be a sec.”
He giggled a high-pitched little kid giggle, then nodded and busied himself slapping the undergrowth to either side of the footpath with a stick.
I headed around the corner toward what I’d seen out the window, checking every so often to make sure Het wasn’t peeking or gearing up for some kind of little kid prank.
Over in a patch of dirt, Re Suli had set up a shrine or an altar of some sort. Two sticks tied into a cross with the catfish skull on top, looking unnaturally white in the moonbeams. A cloth bag hung from each of its spines, and another had been stuffed inside its mouth. I wasn’t any student of craft, but I was willing to bet my life sentence that spell went beyond poking fun at anybody.
I checked Het one more time. He’d gotten bored with switching at the grass and was now breaking his stick into little pieces and throwing them as hard as he could at the sky directly over his head.
I pulled the catfish skull up, unhooking it from the vertical post of the cross. The coarse grit of the catfish’s teeth scraped over the back of my fingers as I pulled the inner bag out. Then I untied the bags hanging from the spines and tossed all three into the woods.
Up front, Het was still pitching broken stick pieces hard enough to tear a muscle. I stuck the catfish head into my tourist shirt, clamping it against my ribs with my elbow, then went back around the shack.
“Much better,” I said. “Now I’m ready to go.”
TWELVE
After Het led me back to town, I said goodbye and headed back to the hotel. I dropped the catfish head into the board-covered shitter, then checked my wristpiece. Only a quarter past nine. Being in the middle of the jungle in a town with no streetlights made it seem like midnight.
I went upstairs to the sleeping porch, kicked out of my pants, and peeled off my shirts. Sweaty. Gross. Those were going to need some laundering when we returned to civilization.
“Hey.” Carina was coming back from the shower in her pajamas.
“Hey.” I turned my back on her, jerked a dry shirt out of the Clean compartment of my bag, and pulled it on. Then I shoved my nasty clothes into the Dirty compartment of my bag. “Did you find that old guy?”
“Nobody in town knows where he lives or how to find him,” she said. “I left a message for him with the people who keep up the market area. They said he’s bound to be back sometime this week.”
I stood up and turned around. “Well, look on the bright side. Maybe the witch isn’t after him at all. Maybe she’s going to use your shrine-in-a-fish to kill you.”
“That I can handle,” Carina said, digging her hairbrush out of her bag.
I climbed into my hammock and adjusted the bloodsucker netting. “But not some old guy you’ve never met before today?”
“I don’t want to be the reason innocent blood gets spilled.”
“You need to work on your haggling, then.”
“I’m going to,” she said.
“And try extra hard not to die,” I said, wiggling to get comfortable and set my hammock swinging. “Dead man’s switch, remember?”
“You’ll get your money, Van Zandt.”
I laced my fingers over my stomach. “Cormac the Child Butcher and Carina the Old Man Killer. You guys are really cleaning house.”
***
I tried to go to sleep. I dug my fingernails into my palms until I felt one break the skin, then I had to back off. Palms were visible.
It wasn’t another racing-thought sleeplessness, but a physical energy keeping me awake this time, an overwhelming need for movement. When I was very, very little and this got into me, I used to run back and forth across my room until I dropped, exhausted. After my father found out what I was doing and told me that it was unacceptable and I wouldn’t be doing it anymore, I began to lie awake, bouncing my head against the mattress or shaking until the extra energy finally used itself up.
Of course, you can’t do things like that when you’re traveling with someone who might look up from her wristpiece at any second and see you.
So I forced myself to hold still for two hours while Carina read. Black frustration built up inside my muscles until my whole body ached from the strain of not moving.
When she finally shut off her wristpiece and closed her eyes, I waited another twenty minutes, then got up, took a lukewarm shower, dressed, and left her asleep or pretending to be asleep in her hammock to find out what sort of nightlife Courten had.
I ended up back at the little “authentic foreign food” bar we’d almost eaten at earlier. With the sun down, the only light came from the glow of the liquor signs and the bug-lanterns hanging from every exposed beam. They lent a softer visual filter to the otherwise unappealing bodies crammed into and around the outside of the joint, in addition to zapping enough flying bloodsuckers to seem as if they’d been set to strobe.
There was a pretty little thing at the end of the bar, shooting doubles. Every time she lifted the glass to her lips, her shirt rode up, flashing a dark, tempting slice of tummy with a cute little black hole of a belly button. That excess energy twisted and popped inside my skin. I exhaled long and deep through my nose, flexing and uncurling my toes inside my shoes.
I avoided the waitresses and picked out a few of the better-looking women for warm-ups. A guy doesn’t proposition another guy in Soam unless he wants to find himself on the receiving end of a lynching.
The first two girls wanted to flirt. The third wanted to fuck, but she wasn’t the doubles girl, so I shoo
k her off.
Over at the end of the bar, Doubles Girl had switched to water, probably an attempt to temper that alcopoisoning she’d been working on.
I came up on her left flank. “Kill it yet?”
She gave me a surprisingly alert look for someone who had just downed enough booze to drop a bullwolf. “Excuse me?”
“Whatever you’re trying to drink away,” I said, leaning my elbows on the bar and putting one sneaker on the boot rail. “Or is this just your preferred method of self-destruction?”
Dimples made deep cuts in her smooth cheeks when she smiled. “I take it any way I can get it. Ain’t no fun if it don’t hurt a little.”
“Now you’re speaking my language,” I said, my voice dropping to a predatory growl she wouldn’t be able to resist.
“Maybe we oughta go somewhere we can hear each other better,” she suggested. “Thataway I can show you how fluent I am.”
***
Doubles Girl and I put each other through the paces on the other side of town in one of Courten’s few big houses. She wasn’t as athletic as she’d looked in the bar, but she was willing to do just about anything and do it at top volume, which was a nice compromise. Rebellious daddy’s girl was my guess, spoiled beyond all hope of redemption if what I saw of her room was any indication. It struck me as a little weird that she took a couple wristpiece snapshots of us in unnatural positions, but she was a lot screwed up, so I filed it under Crazy Drunk Girl Stories, made a mental note to lift her wristpiece before I left, and went back to working off that extra energy.
Afterward, exhaustion hit me. I dropped like a kid who’d just spent the last couple hours sprinting back and forth across his room. Nothing quite as effective in the battle against insomnia as having someone fuck you off to sleep.
Apparently Doubles Girl agreed because she dropped onto the bed next to me and put her head on my shoulder.
I shoved her off. “Don’t touch me. You’re sweaty.”
“AC’s makin’ me cold,” she whined, trying to cozy up to me again. “Warm me up.”
“No, you reek.” I rolled onto my side so my back was facing her. “Go take a shower.”
The covers jerked underneath me. I felt the mattress dip, then heard her stumble out of bed.
“Don’t wanna be here so bad, why dontcha getta hell out already?” All that liquor must’ve been catching up.
“Because the hotel in this ass-backward mudhole doesn’t have air conditioning and I want one decent night’s sleep before I leave tomorrow.” I punched the pillow into a tolerable shape, lay back down, and shut my eyes.
Soft footsteps crossed the floor. A light came on in the bathroom, followed by the shower. The cooling system cycled on, and cold air poured out of the house’s vents.
There wasn’t any holding it off anymore. Sleep dropped on top of me, and the world disappeared.
***
Someone moved against my back, and every muscle in my body froze. I could feel my pulse pounding in my throat. But I could hear the cooling unit running. The electricity was still on.
A woman screamed.
Light slapped me in the face. I blinked as fast as possible, trying to adjust my pupils to the sudden brightness.
Doubles Girl’s room. Still full of expensive objects meant to quantify an indifferent father’s love for his spoiled brat. Now featuring a fully-clothed screaming woman pointing a blood-red nail at me.
“In my room, you bitch!” She grabbed a decorative pillow off of a high-backed princess chair and brandished it like a flail. “I cain’t believe you! In my room!”
Behind me, Doubles Girl giggled. “You weren’t usin’ it.”
“Daddy! Mama!” The flail princess threw the pillow at Doubles Girl and immediately began searching the vicinity for a more effective weapon. “Vai’s in my room! She’s got a guy in my room!”
I rolled off the bed, unhooked my pants from some sort of trophy, and grabbed my shirt off the floor. My sneaks were underneath Doubles Girl’s shirt. I threw her shirt aside and stomped them on.
Doubles Girl sat up in bed without bothering to wrap the sheet around her breasts. I leaned down, cupped one, and ran my thumb over the nipple. It puckered up, cute and dark and the perfect distraction from my other hand on her wristpiece.
“Daddy!” Flail Princess screamed.
From somewhere down the hall came an answering shout and the ruckus of bare feet on Soami hardwood.
I gave Doubles Girl one more tweak and headed for the closest window.
“Message me?” she asked, grinning.
I shot her a wink and a finger gun. “Not on your life.” Then I shot one Flail Princess’s way. “You’re going to want to wash that bedding.”
I unlocked the window, threw open the sash, and climbed out. The whole apparatus slammed behind me as I took off across the porch roof.
***
Even though the sun had yet to rise, Carina was at the hotel breakfast table drinking hot brown liquid that didn’t taste at all like coffee and eating nutsack that didn’t taste at all like fruit when I showed up.
“You’re up early,” I said, wondering whether she’d unknowingly taken her morning dump on the catfish skull that I had stolen back from the crazy-haired Re Suli.
Carina shrugged. “I’m eager to get this showboat on the river.”
“Good. I think I might be wanted in this latrine of a town now too, so the sooner we leave, the better.”
Her eyebrow cocked.
“If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t for serial murder,” I said. “All I did was get nasty with some jungle baron’s attention-starved daughter all over her overachieving sister’s room. I’m going to take a shower, then let’s burn tires.”
THIRTEEN
Giku was a major port city in the Southern Gulf of Soam, just east of the Weeping Mountains. The stolen Fedra got us there in about six hours. While we drove, I recapped the night in Ultra-Def for Carina. She countered by filling me in on the much less exciting topographical map studying she’d been doing. Because I knew it was grossing her out, I counter-countered by adding Sensovision to my descriptions.
“It’s more rainforest,” Carina said, “But there are a few points that could serve as drops if we could find a helicopter pilot willing to fly us in.”
“Sure, I’ll make some calls,” I said. “I’m serious, though. It was gritty as sand. I half expected to find a black pearl cloistered up in th—”
“I was serious when I said I really, really didn’t want to know.”
“And the smell!”
“Not listening.”
“But I dive back in there because at that point, I’m committed—”
The beginning of an infogram on the Weeping Mountains blared out of Carina’s wristpiece. She turned it up louder, trying to drown me out.
I pulled Doubles Girl’s lifted wristpiece out of my pocket, glanced away from the road long enough to open the Recent Pictures, then handed it to Carina. She took it, a confused look on her face.
A second later, she figured out what she was looking at. She threw the wristpiece at me. It bounced off my arm and landed in my lap.
I giggled, rolled the window down, and chucked the digital evidence of my and Doubles Girl’s dirty deeds out.
“You’re not even going to keep it?” Carina asked.
“Why? Were you wanting to borrow it later?”
“No thanks,” she said. “I don’t need the nightmares.”
“It’s okay to be curious about what a grown man and a grown woman do in the privacy of her sister’s bed. It’s only natural.”
“What I just saw was not in any way natural,” Carina said. “If they made a brain-scrubbing substance that could wash away visual memories, I would buy enough to render myself blind.”
“Which reminds me, if you and Nickie-boy ever try that one out, make sure you stretch first. You do not want a leg cramp in that position.”
Carina made a show of turning up the info
gram on her wristpiece again. I laughed. It was shaping up to be a great day.
***
Believe it or not, reputable helicopter pilots don’t advertise themselves as “willing to drop armed passengers in the middle of the jungle,” so when I told Carina I would call around, what I actually meant was that I would spend the entire time that she was driving on my wristpiece contacting transpo people I’d used in the past and asking them for recommendations in Soam. I’ve screwed a lot of informants out of a lot of physical and digital bank rolls in my day, but I don’t mess around when it comes to paying the people who fly, sail, or tunnel me to and from remote jobs. That’s a quick way to end up marooned somewhere. As such, within the getaway drivers’ community, I’ve actually got a sterling reputation.
I ended up with the name of a pilot who worked for a hunting resort chain in Soam, dropping and picking up large-game hunters in the jungle, and who didn’t mind moonlighting on the side for people who had the currency to spare. Carina wanted to meet with him as soon as possible after getting into Giku, but he was running pickups and drop-offs all day and wouldn’t be available until that evening.
We checked into the Glass House, the hotel Carina had booked for us on the drive, and took an elevator up to our rooms.
“Ah!” I inhaled the filtered, purified, and air conditioned scent of five Sarlean stars. “Smells like civilization.”
The good side of Carina’s mouth smirked. “Smells like rich germophobes.”
“Mildew is a very real health concern, Carina.” I watched the digital numbers on the glass panels slow as we came to our floor. “I can’t wait to take a real shower and eat some real food.”
The doors opened, but Carina hesitated as she stepped out. She looked at me. “Did you eat anything while we were in Courten?”
I leered. “Besides that baron’s daughter—”
“Gross. Definitely not what I meant and you know it,” Carina said. “I’m serious, did you eat any food that whole time? I saw you take one bite of citroni fruit at breakfast. We didn’t stick around to eat whatever you ordered us at the bar. You said you were going to fend for yourself for supper last night.”
