by eden Hudson
When we got to the first bridge, Carina stood back and watched a few of the locals cross. The unevenly spaced logs dipped underwater, rolled, and spun. Tourists laughed and screeched and tried to take pictures with their wristpieces as the logs sunk beneath their feet and their shoes filled with what looked like pure radioactive sewage. The locals ignored the tourists, hopping and skipping across the logs without hesitating or looking down.
“If a helicopter wouldn’t get shot out of the sky, I would’ve hired one,” I said. “Probably should have anyway. It’d be safer than skin contact with that sludge.”
“I think I figured it out,” Carina said. She nodded at a pale, knobby Nytundian in a threadbare business suit and creaky-looking but dry wingtips. “See how he’s stepping on the middle of his foot at the apex of the logs? That’s the trick. You’d think you would need to step on the ball of your foot, but…” She shook her head. “No, the flat of your foot is what keeps it from rolling.”
“Yeah?” I said. “And what keeps it from sinking?”
“Speed.” She waited for a rowdy group of tourists to finish fiddlefucking around and get to the other side, then she approached the bridge.
“You’re up to date on all your immunos, right?” I said.
She ignored me and started across.
That log bridge was my first real indication of what Carina was capable of physically. I mean, I’d seen enough of her fight with the bruisers at that Argamerian bar to know that she could handle herself, but this was altogether different. The only way to describe it was that she flitted across the bridge, kind of like a dragonfly or paperina. It was almost like she didn’t touch down all the way in any one spot until she made it to the other side.
Her shoes were almost completely dry.
She had assessed the bridge’s properties, analyzed the attempts on it by other people, and then made a successful crossing. Sir Carina Xiao, the Bloodslinger, wasn’t just muscle and blunt-force trauma. She was finesse and precision. She’d seen the knot, and she’d untied the knot.
“Are you coming or waiting for the chopper?” she called back at me.
I waved her off and stepped out onto the bridge.
Moving fast didn’t seem to do me much good. By about the third step, my sneakers were full of radiation poisoning and liquid chlamydia.
“Aw, sick!” I stepped off the bridge, then took a second to scrape something slimy and suspiciously claw-handed off of the sole of my right shoe and back into the river. “There goes their prime minister.”
That knocked another surprised laugh out of Carina. Unlike the laugh on the plane, she actually let this one out without stopping herself.
“Yeah, yeah, me stepping in some gross river mutie is hilarious.” I took my sneakers off and tried to squeeze a little of the water out of the lining. “I hope you’re laughing this hard at the hospital when I’m getting my lockjaw treated.”
“I don’t think you would survive lockjaw, Van Zandt.”
I stared at her. “Was that a joke? Are Guild knights allowed to make jokes?”
“It’s generally frowned upon,” she said, face straight as a plumb line. “But you’re a bad influence.”
***
The tourist district in Nytundi was flooded with pushcarts and stalls stacked high with flimsy, overpriced souvenirs and various flavors of food poisoning masquerading as local fare. Carina tried to get me to taste something that smelled like imitation coconut frying oil and looked like a cattail on a stick, if the cattail’s stem had been impaled sideways by another stick and batter-dipped in diarrhea.
“Thanks, but I had the runs for breakfast,” I said.
She snorted and took a bite.
We started walking north toward the hotel and sarai district. My stomach growled.
“I can’t believe you’re not dead yet, eating shit like that,” I said.
“Some people don’t grow up with the luxury of being picky.”
“Iron stomach,” I said, shooting her with a finger gun.
She nodded.
“Well, it’ll also go straight to your ass,” I said.
Carina shrugged. “I’ll run a couple extra miles tonight.”
“Yeah, but what are you going to do about that topographical map on the side of your face?”
For a second, her jaw tightened. Then she relaxed and went back to eating as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Seriously,” I pushed, “did some quack tell you it was too late for a plasty? Because I’ve heard of some real miracle workers up near the Crystal Lakes who can make an asshole look like a pair of lips. If you ever want to get a living, breathing, non-scar-fetishist interested in you—without double-bagging your head or giving the guy alchopoisoning—you should think seriously about facial reconstruction.”
She finished chewing a bite of the cattail, swallowed, then said, “Do you think I haven’t noticed that every time you get defensive, you try to insult my scars?”
“What do you want me to do? They’re hard to look at, and I’m not a liar by nature.”
“I don’t need plastic surgery, Van Zandt. I don’t want it.”
“Yeah, but what about taking pity on the rest of us? We’re the ones who have to look at you.”
She stopped walking and turned to face me, pointing at the sinewy mass of pink tissue that was her left cheek, and for a second, I thought maybe she was going to let me touch it.
“This is proof that I survived what other people couldn’t,” Carina said. “This is a reminder of an enemy who couldn’t beat me, of suffering that made me stronger. I’m not ashamed of my scars. I won’t cover them up or try to get rid of them. I’ll wear them with pride until the day I die.”
If Carina would’ve left it at that, I think maybe I could’ve just been fascinated by her. I didn’t even realize that there were people out there who thought that way, not really, just poor people who had to lie to themselves about their looks so they didn’t stick their head in an exitbag and cure their ugliness problem once and for all. None of the women my father had brought home ever showed that kind of backbone. Not for long, anyway.
But Carina couldn’t leave it at that. She had to go and add, “Maybe you should take some time to figure out why you’re so insecure.”
***
Needless to say, I was in a shitty mood by the time we made it to the hotel and sarai district. Normally, that place would be enough to make anybody feel ten feet tall and hung like a blue whale, what with all the prostitutes of both sexes fawning over your godlike body, virile features, and obvious sexual prowess. But it was all a fucking act. They were pawing foreign businessmen twice my weight and half my height, minus my roguish charm. It was disgusting the way the bimbos were throwing themselves at those fat slobs.
Well, maybe they weren’t bimbos. They were working their angle, using what genetics gave them to put food on the table, and they were obviously good at what they did. It was the fat-asses who were disgusting. The only way those sacks of fishshit could get laid was to creep off to a foreign country on a business trip and hit up a hooker half their age.
I checked my wristpiece to make sure we were headed in the right direction, took a side street past a casino whose gaming had spilled out onto the walkway, then made a left. The Palisades was dead ahead—the tallest building in all of Nytundi at sixty-three floors, according to a little plaque in the cornerstone.
A one-plus who looked like his wiring was only second- or third-hand was working the door. He glanced our way, his right eye’s optics zooming in and checking us against any threats he’d been programmed to bounce on out. Nothing about us seemed to set off any alarms in his cyborgnetics. He went back to watching the street.
Carina followed me through the Palisade’s revolving front door into a lobby of sepia-toned marble. Not only was the Palisades the tallest building in this mudhole, it was also the only hotel on the island with legitimate Sarlean stars. Just three, but you had to take what you could get. Like the one-plus at
the door, the whores at the Palisades were a lot higher class—expensive clothes, toned-down makeup, soft-looking hair, and velvety complexions—obviously more exclusive than the ones working the street.
A pale, sun-haired beauty with smoky eyeshadow crept up to us and struck a not-quite-natural pose that stuck out her little boobs like freshly-scratched chigger bites.
“Hey, hello,” she purred, her accent bending the Anglish adorably. “I have not seen you before, lover. I would remember you. I never forget such a strong, beautiful woman.”
And she was cozying up to Carina. Of course. Fuck this country.
Before Carina could answer, the whore leaned in close to me and ran her hand down my arm. “I never forget such a handsome man, too, but I am exclusive this night for another, and he gets so jealous if I even talk to other men.” She pouted. “You will come back tomorrow for me?”
Finally, I caught on. This was all part of her act, filling up her screw card so she wouldn’t go a night without a paying trick.
I patted my pockets. “Sorry, sister. I left my wallet in my other time zone.”
She huffed and stuck her hip out at me by way of dismissal. Her fingers snaked up Carina’s arm, light against dark. “He doesn’t mind other women on my skin. Their smell is so intoxicating, I think he likes it even.”
“Thanks for the offer,” Carina said. “But I’m engaged.” At the whore’s confused look, Carina tried to find another way to say it that might translate. “I’m going to get married. I’m faithful to one man. Exclusive to him.”
“She’s not interested,” I said in a language the whore would understand. “Go hustle somebody else.”
The little whore shot me a sneer, then prowled off.
“This is where our contact wanted to meet?” Carina asked me, eyebrow cocked.
I shook my head. “I picked this place. The whores are just the gravy on top. Come on.”
I led the way across the lobby to the Palisades’s obligatorily dark bar.
We slid into a plush, blood-red booth and scanned the place. Plenty of hookers and clientele of the slightly richer variety. From what I could see, Carina and I were the only Emdoni foreigners, which would make it easy for our contact to spot us.
Nytundi bars existed mainly as a transacting place for high-stakes business, not all-night drinking contests, and had adapted to suit the purpose. No waitstaff circulated. No one came to take our order. The booths were tall and solid, and the tables few and far between, so no one could accidentally overhear anything they shouldn’t.
People came and went, but no one seemed to be looking for a thief and a Guild knight.
“Exactly how many languages do you speak?” Carina asked after a while.
I shrugged. “However many I need to. You want a drink? These people aren’t exactly known for their punctuality. We could be here a while.”
“I could go for a beer,” she said.
“Great, I’ll take a bottled water. Imported. And make sure you tip the guy, even though he didn’t do anything to deserve it, or I’ll end up with something from the 700s.”
Carina snorted, then headed up to the bar to put in our order. She came back with a local stout that would probably give her cancer and a bottled water imported from Soam.
“Couldn’t spare the extra fiver to get an Emdoni import, huh?” I said.
“Soam’s drinking water has a better starting purity than Emden’s,” she said. “It requires a third of the filtration processes.”
“So, no?”
“So, why don’t you just drink beer like a normal person?”
I felt my face pull into a sneer. “Alcohol is the drink of the weak. It makes you lazy and sloppy.”
She shrugged and took a drink from her squat little beer. “Doesn’t me. It also keeps longer than water and has less potential for contamination.”
“And your Guild heritage is hunky-dory with the side effects of imbibing?”
“Everything in moderation,” she said.
“Especially moderation,” I finished the poet Greene’s quote for her.
She nodded and pointed at me. After another sip of her beer, she asked, “Why are you so obsessed with the Guild? Is it because they prosecuted your father?”
I considered flipping the table over and leaving, but I didn’t do either. For one, I was a fucking professional—unlike some asshole knights who apparently wanted to make this personal—and for two, the table was bolted to the floor.
So I laughed instead.
“I studied his files,” Carina said. “I know what he was like.”
Now that was funny. I pounded the tabletop and tried to stop giggling long enough to breathe. You can read books about sharks. You can watch shark infograms where they bite mammoth kraken in half and go frenzy over a single drop of blood. You can dedicate your whole life to studying sharks from the comfort of your apartment. But until you get in the water with a shark, you don’t actually know what sharks are like.
Carina wasn’t deterred by my laughter. “My first case working with the Taern Enforcers, there was a young woman…”
Even though I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she wasn’t talking about Carmelita, Carmelita’s face was still the one that popped into my brain. Beautiful burnt sienna skin, full lips, pearly white teeth. Sincerely kind, carob-colored eyes—the sort of earnest kindness that you only see once or twice in a lifetime.
“Let me stop you right there,” I said, wiping the water from my eyes. My cheeks hurt from laughing so hard. “You got to see one of the bodies, right? A coroner showed you the wounds and ligature marks and explained how everything went down, so now you know what she went through, and working backward from that, you think you can assess what my father was like.”
Carina’s irises darkened to a shade like an emerald wrapped in black velvet. “This was after your father died. The copycat spree.”
I nodded. I had kept close tabs on those myself. The resemblances to my father’s work were a little too close for comfort. Needed to make sure the old man was really dead.
“That’s when you started studying his file,” I said.
She made an agreeing gesture with her beer. “The Enforcers were at a dead end. Your father was dead. Six bodies found that couldn’t possibly be him, but all of which followed exactly his modus and means. The case came up in our criminal psychology class—”
“Wait, you guys take classes? Like with schoolwork and everything?”
“As many as you can stand to between actives,” she said. “Depending on what you want to do with your service. At the time I was looking into urban defense and law enforcement, so when the case came up, I volunteered for an internship with the task force.”
The image of Carina assessing the rolling log bridge nagged at me.
“You were the unnamed ‘invaluable source’ who led to the copycat’s arrest,” I said.
“She thought she was him,” Carina said, her voice almost soft.
“Yeah, I remember. Harley. She’s the one who messaged her mom.”
Probably everyone who’d been alive at that time remembered the message. The eerie calm in her voice right up until the end when she had started to cry. The news blogs and broadcasts had played the audio over and over again, searching for any information about her abduction. Up until Harley, no clues had ever been found about my father’s women. No one had even realized their disappearances were connected.
Months, then years had passed. No one ever found Harley’s body. They assumed she was dead, body swallowed up by some unknown bog. They set up charities and abduction hotlines in her memory. They wouldn’t have if they’d known what really happened.
From the very beginning, Harley had been different from the other women my father brought home. She had managed to get the call out, for one. She’d lived longer than any of the rest, maybe holding onto the hope that someone was going to save her because of that call. They didn’t, obviously. But when Harley finally lost the will to live, sh
e didn’t die. Not the way the other women did.
“She absorbed his personality.” Carina almost looked sick to her iron stomach. “She became him. That’s why your father let her go, isn’t it? Then she picked up where he left off.”
I snorted. “Hey, if it makes you feel any better, my father straight-up told Harley that she wasn’t Lorne Van Zandt, just a worthless piece of tabula rasa come to life, but you know how stubborn women are.”
Carina didn’t crack a smile.
I took a drink of the imported Soam water and winced. “Tastes like cheap plastic and orphan tears.”
“Get your drink for yourself next time,” Carina said. “As a matter of fact, the next round is on you.”
But neither of our hearts was really in it. All the fun was gone from the evening in the whorehouse. Memory lane’ll do that to you.
***
It was nearly midnight by the time our contact showed up. We had both pulled ourselves up out of the muck by then, ordered and eaten a decent meal, and finally gotten the bartender straightened out on where I wanted my bottles of water imported from, so the contact’s mood problem wasn’t our fault. You live under the storm clouds you drag around, as the saying goes.
He stopped in front of our booth, tilting his lousy little head to the side. “You are the Emden citizens looking for the information?”
“Yeah, and let’s holler that around a little louder,” I said. “Not as if we don’t already stick out in this place like the plastic wrap in the condom lineup. Of course, I’d be surprised if half the country doesn’t already know we’re here as long as we’ve been sitting around waiting.”
“The…” He tried to think of the word in Anglish. “The dead man robot who stands at the door…he would not let me in without a suit.”
I studied the mismatched bits of synthetic cloth currently occupying the generally accepted suit stations on his person. “So you rolled a bum?”
“My woman made this.” He smoothed his hand over the buttons that tracked across his scrawny potbelly. “It is my best suit.”
