by eden Hudson
“Is your woman blind or just tasteless?”
Carina shot me a warning glance. “If it’s at all possible for you, Van Zandt, shut your mouth. Let’s get the information so we can plan our next move.”
“She hates your country and she wants to leave,” I told our contact. “And who can blame her, amiright?”
He frowned at me, but Carina cut in before he could think of a suitably angry comeback.
“Please ignore him,” she said. “He has a terrible brain disease that makes idiocy pour out of his mouth like drool. He can’t even hear himself most of the time. Would you like a drink?”
This appeased the contact enough for him to take a seat. Like any good Nytundi male, he was used to women acting in subservient and placating roles, and probably rejecting his every advance. Except for maybe his poor, blind woman.
“That drink is coming out of your payment,” I said. Because this guy was almost certainly also used to being bullied by those bigger and better than him, and I fit that bill in every stretch of the imagination.
“I will take a cane rum,” he said. “Without bitters.”
“Of course.” Carina inclined her head, almost as if she were bowing, and got up to put in the order. Her voice had changed. Even her movements were different. More…submissive. I watched her go, wondering at what point in the thirty seconds since meeting this guy she had realized that was the best way to cross this rolling log bridge.
And also wondering how much of the Carina that I’d seen so far was real and how much was carefully assessed bridge-crossing.
“I am prepared for the exchange,” the contact said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. “If you are also prepared, that is.”
I pulled out the wad of cash I’d brought for this occasion. You can’t deal with Nytundians in digital coinage; most of them don’t have the technology or the capacity to understand fiat currency in its digital form, even though their own paper money is a hilarious placeholder worth less per billion than silt on a sediment farm.
The cash lode in my fist drew the dark eyes of the little whore who’d propositioned Carina and me earlier from all the way across the bar. She scowled at me, then went back to fawning over her date, some ugly bruiser I filed under Carina’s Problems if for some reason we had to fight our way out of this place.
“The witch you seek is most often found in Courten, Soam,” the contact said. “She is a woman, but she fixes things for the people there, like—” His eyes flicked up to the bruiser at the bar, then back to me. “—certain men do here. For money, for power, for favors.”
Carina was standing at the bar with the contact’s cane rum in her hand, looking at me to see if she should approach. I gave her the smallest negative facial twitch. Nytundians don’t like to discuss business around women, even if that woman is the reason for the business, and I don’t like to be obsolete. If she wanted the name or location of the witch who could lead her to the brujahs, she was going to have to keep me alive to get it.
“And this witch knows how to reach the group of aguas brujahs I’m looking for?” I asked. “I don’t want just any knitting circle of wannabe sirens. I’m looking for a specific group from Soam’s Giku area invested in damaging the Guild.”
“The Courten witch works for many people, including those with a…a not-favorable…” He gestured as if that would help me understand. “…a bad interest in the Guild and their mission work. She has even knowledge of a brujah who brought an important Guild knight to his destruction.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
The contact raised his eyebrows as if he was about to impart a huge secret. “She spent some time here fixing something that made it out of her country alive. Conversations with faraway clients are not always secure on old-country communication devices, yeah?”
“Cool, cool.” I nodded. “And who should I ask for when I get to Courten?”
“Re Suli,” he whispered. Nytundians are also ass-backward paranoid about the usage of names and their power to invoke the souls of those attached.
His eyes darted around the interior of the bar and landed on Carina. She turned on an accommodating smile and sauntered over with his rum.
“Enjoy your drink.” I stood up and pulled a couple bills from the wad for the rum, then tossed him the cash.
The contact grabbed the money up, stuck it in his jacket pocket without counting, then gulped down his drink. Tonight was probably going to be a celebratory one for him. He could finally afford that used tin can he’d always had his eye on.
“By the way,” I said, leaning down in front of him and squeezing his bony shoulder, “If this info is trash, I’ll send my fixers back for a refund, and they won’t be nice about taking it.” I slapped his cheek, then stood up. “And here’s some friendly advice—get yourself a real suit and tell your woman to beat feet. She clearly hates your guts.”
***
Once we were in the Palisade’s elevator, I pulled out the cash wad, unfolded it, and stuck the bills I’d taken out for show back into their place.
Carina was staring.
“What?” I said.
“What do you mean, what?” she said. “Why do you have so many bankrolls with you?”
“This is the only hard cash I brought with me.” I shook my head. “I don’t just walk around with unlimited untraceable paper currency, Carina. That would be insane.”
“But I saw you give that to our contact,” she said. “It even had the same roll clip on it.”
“Oh, that! Yeah, I took it back. See?”
“You what? Took it back?”
I rolled the money across my knuckles, then clapped my hands and made it disappear. “Pretty cool, right? Check your pocket.”
Carina pulled the wad out of her pocket and stared at it like it was some kind of abomination.
“I thought you didn’t use magic,” she said.
“Only cheaters use magic. That was just some sleight of hand.”
At this point, Carina was showing a severe lack of amazement for my abilities. She reached over and hit the lobby button on the elevator.
“Our suites are on fifty-eight,” I said.
“I’m taking it back down. Maybe I can catch him before he leaves.”
“What? Why?”
“You trade money for goods and services,” Carina said. “He provided us with a service. Now we pay him. That’s how it works.”
I snorted. “That’s how it works if you’re a sucker.”
The elevator stopped at our floor, but Carina wouldn’t get out.
“You’re serious?” I threw my hands up. “I can’t believe this! We don’t even know if the info he gave us is good or not. He’s probably screwing us over worse, playing both sides of this game, selling info about us to the aguas brujahs!”
She didn’t say anything, just pushed the lobby button again.
I got out. “Okay, fine, go do whatever your little bleeding knight heart tells you to, like some kind of ass-kissing suckerfish. Be a part of their system. Adhere to society’s mores.”
The doors started to shut, but I didn’t stop.
“I thought you Guild types weren’t supposed to get caught up in this world. You’re supposed to be above the things of it.”
“We’re supposed to be above reproach,” Carina said, giving me a look so sickeningly sincere that my skin crawled. “We pay our debts. Always.”
What I could see of her dark face narrowed to a couple inches as the gap between the panels closed.
“That’s a nice white dress you’ve got on, acid-face!” I yelled at the last little sliver of her. “Let me know how clean it stays when you’re slaying brujahs hand over fist!”
I kicked the burnished gold of the elevator doors, then headed for my suite.
***
I don’t have nightmares. Dreams, either. I’ve read about people in the old legends and even in the newer books who claim to have dreams, but I don’t know how much of that is reality an
d how much is a plot device cooked up by overactive imaginations. I lie down at night and after a while there’s nothing and then I wake up, fully rested. So when I can’t sleep, it pisses me off. I need my four hours.
In spite of the scalding shower, soft mattress, heavy comforter, and perfectly chilled room, my brain would not shut off. It was a little like when I was a kid and I couldn’t stop moving, like there was too much energy built up and no way to expend it all, but this time with thoughts.
How dare she—how fucking dare she—and after all that bullshit about my father—dredging up Harley—and she wasn’t even impressed with the pickpocketing—that was a kick in the danglers right there—she didn’t even fucking care that I was so good at what I did that I’d made her and that siltbrained moron believe that he was going home with a bankroll—fucking ridiculous—absolutely fucking ridiculous—fucking white-dressed little crucify-me martyr.
“We pay our debts,” I sneered. I got up and went to the minifridge built into the wall. All the sugar cane sticks, nuts, and chocolates were gone—I had wanted a snack earlier and finished them off—so I flipped through the directory on the little window desk to see what the Palisades had by way of room service.
Some kind of lamb and rice dish and a few dessert items I’d never heard of before. One mentioned chocolate and caramel.
I ordered one of the desserts and charged it to the incidentals account Carina had set up. It was pretty great, so I ordered another. By the time I was most of the way through the third, my stomach was starting to ache from all the sweet, so I ordered up some lamb and rice to balance it out. The salt and the savory of that helped soaked up some of the richness from the chocolate and caramel.
When the dishes were empty, I piled them on top of each other. It looked like a lot when you put them all together like that. Four separate trays. I grabbed the stack of flatware and opened the door to the hall, thinking maybe I should see if the Palisades had a gym onsite.
I heard someone in the hallway before my eyes could focus. I stopped the trays’ forward momentum and shoved them behind my room door before sticking my head out.
Carina. She was at the far end of the hallway, leaning with one side of her face pressed against the window as if she were trying to listen to the night outside. She glanced my way, gave me an acknowledging half-smile, then went back to listening.
It took a second for me to figure out why she might be smearing her acid scars all over the hall window of the fifty-eighth floor, but it finally registered. She was checking her messages. Out of curiosity, I looked down at my wristpiece. The reception here was almost nonexistent.
I tossed my dishes onto the window desk in my room, grabbed the suite’s old-fashioned key card, and stuck it in the pocket of my pajama pants. The door wheezed and clicked shut behind me as I headed down the hall toward Carina.
“Think anybody on this island has even heard of the laptic grid?” I asked her.
The good corner of her mouth lifted in a wry expression. “Seems unlikely, but I don’t want to try the local devices.”
I thought back to our contact’s huge trade secret. “That’s for the best. What’s the matter? Can’t your wristpiece run speech-to-text from your messages?”
“Yeah.” She finally gave up and stepped away from the window. “There’s a lot you can’t discern from text, though.”
“Subtext.” I shot her with a finger gun.
She mimicked the gesture, adding in a wink.
“I don’t do it like that,” I said.
“Sure you do.”
“No, I do it like this.” I winked and finger gunned her down. “So, whose subtext were you trying to discern? Somebody at the office find out you were on your way to break Guild law?”
Carina glanced down at her wristpiece, then back up at me. “Officially, I’m on mourning leave. Nobody at the Guild should miss me for another couple weeks.”
“But somebody does.”
She nodded reluctantly. Didn’t I tell you that the really interesting people need every word pried out of them? They never volunteer anything.
So I prompted her with, “Who?”
“My fiancé.”
“So he wasn’t just a rejection tactic for that little hooker.” I did some calculations. I’m not always great with the passage of time—sometimes things that feel like they happened when I was a kid are only a day old, sometimes things that feel brand new and immediate are long over. “You’ve been away for almost three days now. How is it that this guy just now noticed his future wife is missing?”
“He would’ve gotten back from a two-month active this morning. Well, tonight here. Morning Emden-time.”
“I take it he doesn’t know you’re out for brujah blood?”
“It’s none of his business,” she said, a razor edge to her voice.
I put my hands up, palms out. “Hey, I’m not accusing anybody of anything. What gets you revenge gets me paid.”
“Sorry,” Carina said. She rubbed her eyes and leaned her back against the window. “I just…I wanted to hear his message.”
“So you can tell if the subtext is pissed?” I guessed.
She shot me with another finger gun.
I shot her back. “You’re terrible at that.”
“It’s not intuitive,” she said.
“Stop trying to pull the trigger.” I held up my hand to demonstrate. “Your finger is the barrel. There is no trigger.”
“How do you shoot it, then?”
“This isn’t Weapons Design 101, genius. It’s a fake gun.”
That made her laugh. “You’re crazy. You know that, right?”
“I’m not the one trying to shoot someone with a fake gun.”
For some reason that set her off harder. Carina covered her mouth, but she couldn’t staunch the giggling.
I grabbed her poorly rendered finger gun and pointed it at the floor. “Be careful with that thing.”
That move almost gave her an aneurism. She laughed until her eyes were watering. A man in a rumpled business suit doing the walk of shame—or maybe it was the walk of pride on this floater—stared at us as he sidled past toward the elevator.
When Carina finally calmed down, she wiped her eyes and shook her head. “I haven’t lost it like that in…” She took a shaking breath and let it out. “Since before the funeral, anyway. Thanks.”
My blood froze in my veins, but I gave her an unconcerned shrug. The women I’d been around tended to fall under a few different categories—clients, marks, obstacles, and sperm receptacles. Carina had hired me, so technically she should go under the client category. But she wasn’t acting like a client. I knew professional pleasantry, and this wasn’t like any of it I’d ever experienced. And here she was whipping this out right on the heels of throwing that little snit about not paying our contact.
If I hadn’t known that she’d done so much research into my father and Harley, if I hadn’t seen her manipulate our contact so easily, if I hadn’t seen that cold, analytical look while she stared down the rolling log bridge, I might’ve been able to take Carina at acid-scarred face value. As it was, though, I half expected the damn flame kigao to pop up and start warning me that the electricity was about to go out.
I kept up the easygoing grin. I would figure it out. Carina would come undone eventually. Everybody does. It’s all part of the same knot.
SIX
Another first-class cabin, this time on Flight 210 to Soam. I walked a shiny steel washer I’d found in the aisle back and forth across my knuckles and wondered how integral to the structural security of the plane it had been before it fell off.
“So this mysterious fiancé,” I said. “How’d you guys meet?”
Carina shrugged without looking away from her window.
“Shrug you don’t know or shrug you don’t want to talk about it?” I asked.
“Don’t you ever feel like sitting quietly in contemplation?”
“Almost never. Even less so when I find
out that somebody is easily annoyed. Come on, we’ve got six more hours minimum before we get anywhere. That is, if this plane doesn’t get hijacked and used to plow dirt by some Nytundi punk.”
She looked at me. “That’s not funny.”
“Yes, it is, and you know it is.” I balanced the washer on my thumbnail, flicked it into the air, then caught it. “Sir Carina Xiao, the Bloodslinger.” Flick. Catch. “Named knight of the Guild.” Flick. Catch. “Tell me a story, Bloodslinger. Tell me a romance.” Flick. Catch. “How did your future hubby sweep you off your feet?” Flick. Catch. “Or did you do the sweeping?”
“Will you stop fidgeting and be quiet for a while if I do?”
Flick. Catch. “Doesn’t sound like me.” Flick.
Carina snatched the washer out of the air. I scrubbed my empty palm down the thigh of my jeans and stared at her expectantly. My eyes started to dry out before she finally gave in.
“Fine,” she said. “You’ve noticed that I’m not very big for a knight?”
“I assumed your parents went for the speed augmentations rather than the strength.”
The good corner of her mouth turned up. “That’s a nice way to say it. But I was even scrawnier when I was a kid. My genetics took longer to kick in than most of the other children’s. My mom called it blooming late. The other instructors were worried about me. They tried to pair me with the weaker kids in training. It was humiliating. So one day when our hand-to-hand instructor was about to start the lesson, I walked up to Nick Beausoleil, the biggest kid in our year—”
“And you beat the ever-loving hell out of him,” I interrupted.
“Not even close,” she said. “Nick was huge. If I’d stayed outside of his reach, I would’ve been fine. But I didn’t want to win by wearing him down, I wanted to win by might, to prove I was as tough as anybody twice my size. Of course, at the time, I didn’t realize that Nick wanted to prove to the world that he was every bit as tough as his seven older siblings. I woke up against the far wall with a knot the size of an egg growing on my temple.”
