by eden Hudson
A shot cut through the revenant mist and took the remaining synchrodiving brujah down. Carina spun, trying to get the next brujah in her knuckgun’s sights.
With a sound like a gasp, all of the revenants sucked inward at once. Where the four drinking brujahs had been shouting up at the sky now stood four many-tentacled creatures of dense black shadow.
Carina fired. Her knuckgun’s slide locked back.
The shadow creature she’d shot absorbed the bullet. The air rattled, then drops of molten slag hissed through the rain toward Carina.
She whirled away, ejecting her knuckgun’s empty magazine and slapping a full one home.
The shadow creatures poured themselves across the ground like water, surrounding her. She spun and shot and spun and shot some more. They puked her melted bullets back at her in a burning spray.
I got to my feet and ran. Behind me, I heard the chain-driven saw on Carina’s knuckgun scream to life. I stuck to the edge of the tree line, keeping the shadow creatures in my sight at all times. They were closing in on Carina. Every now and then I caught a flash of her at the center, lashing out with the machete and her knuckgun’s saw, but for the most part all I could see were thrashing tentacles.
The village came up on my right, and I slipped between the lean-tos. The first two altars I found were topped off with clay bowls full of dark pond water. I jumped over a brujah corpse and kept going. The next altar’s bowl was empty.
I stomped the bowl into bloody red shards, then kicked over the altar. Baby finger bones scattered in the mud.
One of the shadow creatures went up in a whoosh of white mist and black flame. The brujah at the center screamed and dropped to the ground, trying to put out the spirit fire as it burned her alive.
I didn’t wait around to see what happened next. I heard the knuckgun, I could guess. I had more important things to do than stand around watching.
I found the next empty clay bowl altar and wrecked it. Another shadow monster whooshed into mist and flame. As soon as she could see the brujah at the center, Carina shot.
One of the two remaining shadow creature’s tentacles finally got hold of Carina’s arm and jerked her toward its empty blackness. Carina drove the machete into its heart. The shadow creature tried to absorb the machete, but Carina held fast.
I tore up another empty-bowl altar. The shadow creature that Carina wasn’t elbow deep in whooshed, and its brujah fell to the ground, howling.
Carina yelled as she fought to keep the rest of her body and what was left of the machete from sinking into the black nothingness at the heart of the last shadow creature.
The next three altars I passed had full bowls. Only one lean-to in the village left. I ran for it.
I heard Carina fire her knuckgun into the shadow creature, maybe to buy herself a little time.
I kicked the last altar as I ran, scattering broken bits of pottery and finger bones. Both crunched and squished into the mud under my shoes as I decelerated to a stop.
From behind me came a whoosh, then the slick sound of a blade being pulled from flesh. I turned around. Carina was bent over, wiping the blood from her machete on a brujah’s bright red shirt. The black flames of spirit fire sputtered and died as the brujah’s soul fled her corpse.
Carina looked up at me, chest heaving as she worked to catch her breath, and shook her head. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Huh?”
“To say,” she breathed. She pointed her machete at the face of the brujah she had just pulled it from. “She’s the bitch who killed my dad, and I can’t think of anything cool to say.”
I cackled. “Me neither.”
EIGHTEEN
It only took us a couple of minutes to track the kids and the last two living brujahs to the cave where they’d hidden out when the shooting began. Without hesitating, Carina put a bullet in both brujahs’ heads, then one in each of the kids’.
I scratched at my scraped collarbone. “What was that thing you said earlier about not wanting to be the cause of innocent blood getting spilled?”
“You don’t leave survivors,” she said. When she looked at me, the slivers of glacial swamp ice were still frozen in her irises. “If that brujah who killed Dad had killed me, too, everyone in this village would still be alive. If my dad and his company had taken out the rest of the Soam force during the war—kids or not—that brujah never would have come for him.”
I grinned as ice water trickled down my spine. I’d done it again, gotten caught up in all the fun and games and forgotten that I was dealing with a dangerous animal. Predator, not pet.
“You would make a great serial killer,” I told Carina. “Of course, with that level of efficiency, you’d put yourself out of a job in about a year.”
***
On our walk back to the decimated brujah village, Carina’s shoulders slumped and her head sagged with exhaustion.
The rain poured on.
“You don’t want to just head back to camp?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “Got to get something first. You can go back without me if you want.”
I shrugged. The undamaged components from those altars could probably bring in some serious money on the analog black market, especially considering the fate of the brujahs who’d built them. No sense in letting all that just rot out here in the jungle when I could be making bank off of it.
The ice from the water monster hadn’t melted, but the carrion cypress’s runoff was flowing into the dark pond again, refilling it. The brujahs in the village were lying where we’d left them. They had paled, bloated, and begun to disintegrate like corpses left in the rain for weeks rather than half an hour.
Carina ignored the bodies and began searching the lean-tos. I busied myself taking pictures of the altars, making sure to get artful shots of the carnage in the background. Then I packed up as many of the bowls and bones as I could carry.
Carina had paused in her search. She was watching me.
“What?” I said. “You have to figure at least a couple of these bowls are going to break in transit. You know how careless international baggage movers are. I can’t fence broken pottery, Carina. That would be terrible for business.”
“We both know you don’t care about the money,” she said.
I smiled. “That’s adorable. You think you’re a mind-reader now.”
Carina didn’t argue, just went back to searching in and around the lean-tos.
A few minutes later, she came up with a hardhead catfish skull impaled on a pristine thornknife. She jerked the thornknife out and stuck it in her belt. Then she hefted the catfish skull in her hand, bouncing it around on her fingertips until its crucifix faced her. One of its spines was missing.
“This is the catfish head Dad gave Mom when he came back from Soam,” she said, tracing the rounded edge of the missing spine with her thumb. “I knocked it off the shelf roughhousing with Mom when I was a kid—broke off the spine and made this scuff mark on the side. I knew I saw it earlier, but I was so focused on that pond monster…”
“Now that’s a trophy,” I said, pointing one of my clay bowls at it. “Kind of makes you wish you hadn’t traded your fish head off to Re Suli, huh?”
“I’m too tired to play this with you right now, Van Zandt,” Carina said. She stood up, cradling the catfish skull to her hip with one hand. The other hand she stuck out to me. “Thanks for taking out those altars. You probably saved my life.”
I dismissed her hand with a wave of a clay bowl. “I couldn’t have you dying when we were this close to payment. Dead man’s switch, remember?”
The way she smiled then was too small to be impeded by her scars. She lifted her wristpiece and punched in some commands.
“The switch is off. The money’s in your account to stay,” she said when she was done. “You more than earned it.”
“You get what you pay for,” I said, shooting her with the clay bowl version of a finger gun.
***
It w
as still raining when we made it back to camp. Neither of us wanted to put forth the effort to get a fire going for water-boiling and gruel-reconstituting, so we both took a QalORun bar and slogged into our hammock tents.
I got naked, toweled off with some of my dry clothes, put on some shorts, and scarfed my food.
“Head to the clearing first thing in the morning?” Carina called across camp.
“Yeah.” I carefully wrapped each bowlful of bones in dry clothing and nestled them in my bag. “Think Atson will show up with a chopper full of SecOps?”
I couldn’t hear Carina’s sigh over the constant hiss of raindrops on my tent, but I heard its remainder in her voice when she answered. “We’ll burn that rolling log bridge if we come to it.”
I smiled and crawled into my hammock. “Goodnight, Carina.”
“Goodnight, Jubal.”
NINETEEN
The next day the rain disappeared. In its place settled a heat so intense that we could actually see the steam rising from the leaves and moss as we hiked. We used up our entire supply of water purification tablets that morning trying to replace the gallons of water leaking out of our pores, and still neither of us had to stop for a single potty break.
For the most part, we were able to stick to the trail we’d taken into the dark pond area, but the rainstorm had brought down new tangles of vines and branches, so Carina put her machete back to work.
When we stopped to risk our colons on some unpurified water and rest around noon, we checked our wristpieces’ nav screens.
“Probably two hours left,” Carina said. “I’m going to set off the pickup beacon and send him an ETA.”
I nodded and wiped my sweat-soaked shirt across my sweat-soaked face. Surprise, surprise, it didn’t help.
“Ready?” Carina asked, standing up.
“And raring.” I popped to my feet and carefully shouldered my bag. “Let’s go find out if Atson fucked us over.”
***
The timing turned out to be perfect. Just before we made it to the drop point, we started hearing the rhythmic whump of helicopter blades in the distance.
A wide smile stretched across my face, and renewed energy rushed through my veins. We were almost there. Carina was grinning, too. We jogged the rest of the way to the clearing and stopped just under the cover of the trees to put on our harnesses.
The Dangerous Game trademarked helicopter swung into the open sky overhead. Carina and I spread out to get different visual angles on the bay.
Dax leaned out and dropped a line. I couldn’t see anyone else up in there with him.
“What do you think?” I yelled at Carina over the wind.
She had drawn her knuckgun.
“Looks like they’re alone from here,” she yelled back.
“Same here.”
We sprinted to the rope, getting under the belly of the helicopter so that anyone inside who wanted to shoot us would have to lean out. Dax was still the only one in sight. Carina stood guard with her knuckgun while I hooked my harness on and waved up at him. Dax gave the rope a jerk to make sure it was attached, then leaned back into the bay.
The winch lifted me slowly and steadily off my feet. I grabbed the rope to stay upright. At the top, I climbed onto the landing gear and Dax helped me into the bay. I unhooked, and he tossed the rope back down to Carina.
Nothing seemed to have changed from our first drop. Either they had ignored the emergency alert on Carina, deleted it without reading, or all of the SecOps were waiting for us back at the resort. Atson might even have dismissed the alert without thinking about it. The sterile Guild file photo the authorities had sent out didn’t look anything like the beautiful, playful woman who’d met Atson at the Giku dinner club, even with the scars. First impressions were hard for most people to shake.
I carefully set my bag full of delicate brujah pottery far away from the door, then came back to look out.
Dax had started the winch. Carina was ascending, one hand on the rope and one hand hidden behind her.
She asked me the SecOps question with a twitch of her eyebrows. I shook my head. Her obscured hand moved, tucking the knuckgun into the back of her pants, then joined her other hand on the rope.
“The electricity is about to go out,” my flame kigao whispered, touching my shoulder.
My head snapped up. A shiny, mud-dauber-black chopper came into view a few dozen yards away, pointing its many-barreled mounted minicannon at us. The Dangerous Game chopper shook with turbulence, then leveled out.
“DGR-17,” a VoxAmp blared from the black chopper. “BE ADVISED THAT YOU ARE TRANSPORTING WANTED MURDERER CARINA XIAO. RETURN XIAO TO THE GROUND IMMEDIATELY OR YOU WILL BE TREATED AS HOSTILE.”
Carina was still five or six yards from the bay. Below her, uniformed SecOps were flooding the clearing. She drew her knuckgun again, craning her neck to get a better view of the ground.
Beside me, Dax’s mouth hung open. He looked paralyzed with shock. In the cockpit, Atson was speaking as fast as he could into his headset.
“NEGATIVE, DGR-17.” The butchered Soami Anglish coming over the VoxAmp deepened with frustration. “XIAO IS CLASSIFIED EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. RETURN XIAO TO THE GROUND IMMEDIATELY OR WE WILL OPEN FIRE.”
To prove that they were serious, the SecOps’ gunner started to spin the minicannon’s barrels.
Atson glanced over his shoulder at Dax and me. In spite of his cushy job in Giku, it was obvious that he couldn’t make peace with tossing one of his countrywomen to the Soami dogs. He would rather try running and get us all killed.
“FINAL WARNING, DGR-17. RETURN XIAO TO THE—”
I leaned out and looked down.
At some point during the initial turbulence, Atson had been forced to yield the airspace over the clearing to the SecOps chopper. We were over jungle now.
Carina was only two yards from the landing gear. She reached up at me with her free hand.
Without even thinking about it, I grabbed one of the straps in the bay and reached for her.
She smiled, relieved.
That’s when the final bit of the knot unraveled and the poisoned knife hit home.
All of the handling other people together, all of the flirting and joking and pretending to be friends, all of the vulnerability and humility and loneliness and leading on—it had all been preparation for a moment like this. She’d been conditioning me so that when I had to face the choice—save my own skin or try to save her and take myself down with her—I wouldn’t even think about it. She had tricked me into believing that we were linked, these unique beings in a world full of siltbrains who couldn’t understand us, two fires that burned too hot, consuming the planet in search of an intellectual equal—I’m like you and we are in agreement—a team, a we, Carina and me versus the world. But there was no we. There was only Carina and her human safety net, her get-home guarantee, one Jubal fucking Van Zandt. She’d handled me, and I’d made it so easy. I saw it happening and I went along willingly anyway, just like one of my father’s victims.
The only person who can catch you is you, his voice rang through my head.
A laugh slipped out from between my clenched teeth. Instead of grabbing Carina’s hand, I jerked my hand back. Her dark brows scrunched together in confusion as I stood up.
I waved at the SecOps minicannon’s gunner and gave him the Just a sec motion, then leaned back into the bay and lifted the wicked-looking hunting knife from Dax’s belt.
I leaned back out.
Carina’s eyes went wide when she saw it. “What are you doing?!”
I didn’t answer. She knew.
“Jubal!”
“Nice touch, using my first name,” I yelled down at her as I worked. “Really gives it the ring of sincerity.”
They sure made those winching ropes to last. I put my whole body into sawing. Since the winch was still running, I had to follow my original cut up into the bay. For a second, I lost track of Carina, but I could still hear her yelling something. I h
acked apart the last few threads.
Both ends of the rope sprung loose, the inside bit snapping against the ceiling. Dax and I were lucky not to lose an eye.
I lunged for the strap hanging from the ceiling, grabbed it, and leaned out.
The look of shock on Carina’s face as she fell was damn sure real. Her plan had fallen apart, unraveled like a slipknot. She wheeled her arms and kicked her legs as if she could flail herself into the bay.
“Almost got me, Carina,” I yelled, shooting her a wink and a finger gun. “The only person who can catch me is me, but you sure gave it a good run.”
Just before Carina hit the canopy, she did what I would’ve done if I had miscalculated badly enough to be in her boots. She pointed her knuckgun at me.
But she didn’t pull the trigger.
A second later, she crashed through the treetops and disappeared.
The black SecOps chopper descended on the clearing where Carina and I had been picked up less than three minutes ago.
I sat down, crossed my legs, and slapped the wide-eyed, open-mouthed Dax on the back like an old friend.
“It’s okay, I saved us,” I told him, shaking the restless energy out of my shoulders and shifting from one side of my butt to the other. “Let’s get back to civilization. This hero could use a shower and some real food.”
Of course, all of this was before I found out I was dying of the plague and only Carina could save me.
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