by eden Hudson
“Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead eating in any place with fewer than four Sarlean stars,” I admitted. “But I had to meet up with someone here once, and it turns out their line cook is a fucking magician with biscuits and gravy. Don’t bother with that.” She’d been pulling the little menu card out of the holder. “I already ordered for us. You can thank me after you try them.”
“Do they even serve breakfast this late?”
I shrugged. “It’s six a.m. somewhere.”
When the waitress came by again, Carina ordered a glass of filtered water even though I advised against it. They might have the best biscuits and gravy in the country, but I’d seen what passed for filtered water in this place.
A few minutes later, Carina’s water showed up looking like it had been filtered through an old jizz sock.
“You’re going to die someday,” I said, shrugging. “Might as well be today.”
The good side of Carina’s mouth smirked. “I’ll survive. I’ve got an iron stomach.”
“I bet that makes it tough to swim,” I said.
“You learn to compensate.” She took a drink and didn’t even grimace. “So, what did you find out?”
“I found our starting point, that’s what. You’re going to need two first-class seats on an airliner to Nytundi.” I gestured at her wristpiece. “You’re welcome to start booking while we talk, although I doubt the tickets are in high demand, what with the war going on.”
“Wait, Nytundi?” Carina leaned forward, elbows on the table. “How do brujahs from Soam have anything to do with a little island nation halfway across the world?”
“Everything has to do with everything,” I said. “That’s the first thing you learn in my business. It’s all part of the same knot. The second thing you learn is, if you’re looking for an in with murderers, you go to the murder capital of the Revived Earth.”
“So we can become statistics.”
I waved my hand at that. “Tourists almost never disappear there anymore.”
The waitress dropped off the plates, and I went to work on mine. Carina ruined hers by adding red pepper flakes before she even tried a bite, but I politely refrained from calling her a tasteless retard because it’s rude to talk with your mouth full.
When we were done, Carina wiped her mouth with a napkin and leaned back in the booth.
“I ate entirely too much,” she said. “I can’t believe you were able to get through two orders.”
I patted my stomach like I didn’t give any fucks about what she was implying. “It takes a lot to fuel this finely-tuned love machine. Besides, I didn’t hear you complaining while you were chowing down.”
“They were good,” she said, shrugging.
“Maybe you should consider eating out more often. If you had some halfway feminine curves, people might not focus so much on the messed-up side of your face.”
She rolled her eyes and started working on her wristpiece. “How soon can you be ready to leave?”
“Ten minutes from now.”
“Looks like the soonest flight leaves tomorrow. I’ll message you the ticket information. Meet you at the airport?”
“As long as the seats are first class. If they’re not, I’ll complain the whole way to Nytundi and fill your life with misery and woe.”
FOUR
“This is…” Carina stared around her at the plane’s first-class cabin. “…wasteful… extravagant… It’s overly luxurious, to a ridiculous level.”
“The word you’re looking for is mediocre,” I said, leaning my seat back as far as it would go. “When I was a kid, these things folded out into beds. Now look at them. And the carpet? See, this is the problem with economic progress. The underclasses start thinking they’ve got the right to fly too, so the air travel companies start catering to their shit tastes and shit wages, downgrading everything, and the people who actually have the money to fly in the fashion a human being should fly are the ones who end up losing.”
“Do you ever stop and listen to the things you’re saying?”
“Not if I can help it.” I laced my hands behind my head and wiggled my shoulders, trying to get comfortable. “Why don’t you relax? It’s a long way to Nytundi.”
“You confirmed the meeting with our contact?” Carina asked.
“Asking questions like that is the opposite of relaxing.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re sure the information’s good?”
“Good as you’re going to get.”
Carina put her elbows on the armrests and leaned her head back against her seat. Probably as comfortable as Guild knights ever got. Those goons had a real problem with the luxuries of this world. Really putting all their eggs in the glorious afterlife basket.
“Why the Guild?” I asked.
She rolled her head my way. “What are you talking about?”
“I get that your family’s been part of the Guild for almost as long as the Guild has existed. But you’re obviously okay with thinking for yourself or we wouldn’t be on this plane right now. You could have chosen to do something else with your life. Strike out on your own. Be someone. Why blindly follow the Guild?”
For a long time Carina was silent, her expression turned inward, but I was starting to get the hang of her rhythms. This was something she did before she just started talking: she thought.
That meant a lot of really interesting things. For one, it meant that she’d grown up in an environment that encouraged coherent answers. It also meant that the people who expected those answers had been willing to wait for them. Wrong answers must’ve been punishable by something the younger Carina had hated or been afraid of, and so she took the time to come up with the right answers. I wondered what the punishment had been and whether her father had been the one to dole it out. Probably not, considering she was so thirsty to avenge the guy’s death.
“It’s not blind following,” she said finally. “I’ve seen the Guild inside and out, from every angle. It’s not always pretty, and it’s not always perfect, but the people who commit their lives to it are really trying to do what’s right.”
“What’s right according to God,” I added.
Carina shrugged. “Yeah.”
“How do you know God’s right?”
“He hasn’t failed me yet,” she said. “Based on His track record, I have faith that He won’t.”
“Except in the matter of avenging your old man.”
“The Guild failed in that, not God.”
I threw up my hands. “See! You’re not some mindless sheep. You could’ve done something with your life besides holy wars and inquisitions and whatever else you meatheads do for fun.”
“Shaming sinners,” she volunteered, the unscarred corner of her mouth lifting. “That’s actually our most popular intramural sport.”
***
“The electricity is about to go out,” a feminine voice whispered in my ear.
I sat up, heart pounding.
My flame kigao was floating just above Carina’s seat, the reds and oranges of burning impurities roiling and boiling in the shape of an unclothed, barely-developed pubescent girl, almost bent into what a kigao might consider a sitting position, if indeed kigaoe could consider anything at all.
Most of the other first-class passengers were sleeping, but the few who were awake didn’t seem distressed. No screams, no panic, nothing obviously out of place. A steward sidled past, the blankets he was carrying whispering through the kigao’s flaming hair undamaged.
The kigao patted my hand gently and blinked sympathetic eyes the color of burning blood. “The electricity is about to go out.”
It damn sure didn’t look like anything was wrong, but the kigao had never steered me wrong before.
Carina came down the aisle from the bathroom. She and the steward said the appropriate excuse mes and squeezed past one another on her way back to her seat.
“The electricity is about to go out,” the
kigao said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mumbled.
“Yeah what?” Carina asked, sitting down in the middle of the kigao.
For a second their forms overlapped and it looked like Carina was on fire. Her dark skin shined through the flames like cooling lava, and her eyes seemed to be on the verge of exploding into fountains of blood-soaked emerald starlight. Then the kigao stood and flitted off to stand half in and half out of the plane’s wall.
“Nothing,” I said. “Do you notice anything…weird?”
“The electricity is about to go out,” the kigao said helpfully.
Carina straightened up in her seat and turned her head, scanning the interior of the first-class cabin for threats. “I don’t think so. What exactly am I looking for?”
I slouched and shook my head. “I don’t know. Never mind.”
The kigao touched my shoulder. “The electricity—”
I shrugged her hand off. “I heard you, damn it!”
“Van Zandt, are you all right?”
“Yeah, just peachy. Something’s about to blow up in our faces, that’s all.”
“What?”
I rolled my eyes. “Who fucking knows? Maybe the whole damn plane.” I slammed open my window shade. The kigao flickered out of my way so I could look out. “Are we still over the Crist? We’re more likely to survive if we crash down in water, right?”
“If you know something, now would be the time to tell me,” Carina said. “I can’t help if I don’t know what we’re facing.”
“Or maybe it won’t happen until we land. Sometimes it takes a while, but the way she phrases it always—”
“She? Are you on something?”
“I don’t take chems!” I smacked my window shade shut again. Black treble hooks of restless, crawling energy twisted inside my skin. I slumped back in my seat, rubbed my hands across my face, and joggled my legs. “Did the power ever go out when you were growing up? You lived in the Guild’s fortress, right? Did the electricity ever go out or was it steady enough in Taern back then that it was always on?”
Carina nodded slowly. “It went out sometimes. Usually during the megacell storms.”
“At night?”
“Sometimes.”
“Hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm.” I ran my hand through my hair. Sweat prickled down my back and trickled into my asscrack. I couldn’t sit still any longer, so I stood up and pushed past Carina to the aisle.
At the same time, the curtain separating the first-class cabins from the rest of the passengers flew back and a skinny Nytundi teenager shoved through, waving a FATrifle half his height and probably twice his weight. The kid opened his mouth to yell something.
“Oh, that’s just great!” I interrupted, gesturing at him. “This asshole. Let me guess, buddy—you’re taking this plane for your side in the ongoing Nytundi hostilities?”
The kid didn’t answer, so I switched to Nytundi’s New Tongue.
“Hijacking? Really? In the middle of the fucking week? I vouched for your stupid country, kid. That’ll teach me. Never vouch for anything.”
“Sit in your seat!” The kid bumblefucked up the Anglish so bad even I almost couldn’t understand him. He pointed the FATrifle at me. “Sit down! Do not move! I will shoot!”
“Could you at least enunciate? I mean, shit, you’re the mouthpiece for this operation? What is it, a suicide run? Your friends couldn’t stand your stuttering anymore, so they sent you to crash the plane into— Wait, does Nytundi even have buildings, or is it all just mud huts?”
“Shut your fucking mouth or I’ll put a bullet in your head!” the kid screeched in his native language.
“I’ll believe it when I see it, you cross-eyed little piece of fugu shit,” I said.
Carina slipped past me like a cold breeze. The kid swung the muzzle of the FAT her way, but she was already on him. One malnourished child suicide soldier wasn’t even close to a match for a Guild knight. She grabbed the rifle and jerked it out of his hands. The strap of the FAT yanked him forward. Carina slammed the rifle butt into his stomach, then smashed her fist down on the back of his head when he doubled over. He dropped like a bag of rickets and calcium deficiency.
Then Carina swung the FAT around, tucked the butt up against her shoulder, and headed through the curtain and toward the back of the plane.
“Drop your weapons!” she yelled.
I ran back to the curtain and swiped it aside. If Carina got killed in an in-air dispute on this job, I was out my fee plus the return ticket.
Luckily, the kid’s hijack-mates were as outclassed as he had been. Carina had the other three on the floor and secured in about ten seconds.
Which turned out to be inversely proportional to the amount of time the stewards and stewardesses spent fawning over her afterward. It wasn’t like she was some untrained, unexpected hero. Carina killed bad guys for a living—had been doing so since she was a kid, as Guild knights were wont to do. Even she looked uncomfortable with the weird amounts of admiration these siltbrained morons were heaping on her.
“For fuck’s sake, it’s not like she saved the Revived Earth or something,” I snapped at them. “Don’t you people have other passengers to steward? Pull your lips off of her ass so she can sit down already.”
They all took turns at giving me their hairiest nictitating membrane as they stalked off.
“That’s right, hate the guy who suggests you do your job.” I sat back in my seat and kicked up the footrest. “God forbid you be forced to earn your paycheck.”
Carina sat down next to me, trying unsuccessfully to fight off a grin. “Making friends, everywhere you go.”
I shot a wink and a finger gun at a stewardess who was dragging her feet. She bit her thumb at me before spinning around and stalking off down the aisle.
Then I realized what had happened. I threw my hands up. “You didn’t say anything cool! Neither of us did. We’re sustaining a severe pithiness deficit on this mission.”
That made Carina laugh out loud. I don’t know who the sound surprised more, her or me. She pressed her fingers to her lips and stopped herself as soon as the first syllable escaped her throat.
For a long time we sat there not talking. Carina scratched the back of her head, then picked at a thread on her armrest.
“Your hand is shaking,” I said. “Actually, all of you is shaking. You weren’t scared of those kids, were you?”
“No, I was scared of the .50 caliber grapeshot they had loaded.”
I threw back my head and laughed until my eyes watered and my stomach hurt.
When I finally calmed down some, Carina got serious. “Before this all went down, you said something about what she said, but the hostiles I found were all male. From what I’ve read, it’s really uncommon for any Nytundi woman to join the military or guerilla forces. It goes against their cultural psychology. Did a civilian tell you something or did you overhear some women talking about one of these guys carrying a weapon? If there’s someone else on the plane who might be involved, I need to know.”
“You stopped the imminent threat,” I said. “There’s no one else involved that I know of. There’s nothing else to worry about. Yet. I’ll let you know if something else comes up.”
“You were really freaked out, Van Zandt.” Her dark eyebrows pulled low over her green eyes. “When I first came back from the bathroom, you looked like you were about to vomit seawater. If I didn’t know any better, I would almost say the second you saw that kid with the rifle, you were relieved.”
“I was relieved,” I said. “I was relieved our whole damn plane wasn’t about to take us on an impromptu tour of the ocean floor. Anyway, you’re really sweaty now. You should see if your new fan club has anything you can borrow to towel off with. You look disgusting.”
Carina leaned her seat back. She closed her eyes, but her breathing didn’t change. She wasn’t asleep.
“Don’t you care that you look like something a kraken digested?” I asked.
She shru
gged without opening her eyes.
I chewed on my thumbnail for a while.
“What was your dad like?” I asked her.
Carina looked at me. “Why?”
“Why what? I’m trying to make small talk.”
A long pause followed while she stared at me, but it didn’t feel the same as when she was thinking carefully before responding. This time I got the uncomfortable feeling that she was trying to figure me out.
“Never mind,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
I shut off my overhead light and laid my seat back again.
After a while, Carina shut her light off, too. In the half-light, I could see her turn on her side as if she were lying in bed next to me.
I was starting to wonder whether she actually had fallen asleep when she said in a really small, quiet voice, “He was the best.”
FIVE
The war in Nytundi isn’t officially a war. It’s more of a stalemate between the two main political factions, with some executions, suicide bombings, guerilla attacks, and rude name-calling going on behind the scenes. But the Nytundi government is always pretty sure that they’re doing a good job keeping the whole affair under wraps, which is why Carina, I, and all of the other passengers aboard Flight 1751 from Emden were allowed to land and walk around unescorted in what passed for a capital city on this floater of an island.
Of course, we and pretty much every other foreigner stuck out like the noose in the rosary pile. Nytundians were your classic third world inhabitants—no genetic modifications, no plasties, outdated technology, overchemmed and undernourished. Even their superrich—who I assume could afford payments on both the bombed-out shell of what used to be a tarpaper shack and a pair of shoes—were little skinny stick people with hair like dried straw and skin the color of a catfish’s belly. It was gross.
The only good thing about Nytundi was that everything a foreigner could possibly be looking for was located in its capital city so you didn’t have to run around the island on wild goose chases. The capital was divided up into districts by the seven rivers that flowed to The Waters at the city center. To meet our contact, we had to cross the rolling log bridges that spanned the rivers between the business district, the tourist district, and the hotel and sarai district.
