Beautiful Corpse

by eden Hudson

  I stifled a giggle. The creature of the Dead Estuaries that was speaking in the voices of the people we had known was not scared of Nickie-boy or anybody else on this physical plane.

  “I know you’ve had a lot of mommies leave you, but I’m not like them.” Ice cold blood poisoning poured from the top of my skull down, freezing everything in its path. The cuttle must’ve locked onto my giggle. “They just had trouble understanding your daddy. But I’m not going anywhere. I promise you, I won’t go away like they did.”

  “Get it back,” Carina said. She slapped Nick’s bicep and demanded, “Start talking! Say anything! Hey, come back here, you fishshit moron! Ass cuttle! Follow my voice if you want something really juicy to suck on! I’ve got your dead voices right here!”

  The low froggy sound of Carina’s father flowed through the APC, disappointment heavy in his voice, but I couldn’t understand the words. I was begging Carmelita, trying harder than I’d ever tried in all of my six years to make someone understand, but she wouldn’t listen. Those beautiful carob-colored eyes couldn’t see Lorne Van Zandt sneaking up behind her, leveling the knuckgun at the back of her head. His smile never faltered.

  “Do you see this waste, Jubal?” he asked as the lifeblood ran out of a hole between those earnestly kind, sincerely sweet eyes. “This utter waste of beauty? Answer me.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you had kept your GODDAMN MOUTH SHUT, Carmelita could’ve stayed with us for a very long time.” He smoothed back a stray hair that had fallen across his forehead. His dark brown eyes, my dark brown eyes, caressed Carmelita’s cooling cheek. “Don’t ever try to sell out your old man again.”

  The ground rocked beneath me. Gunshots like faraway echoes. Other voices bounced off of my eardrums, but I could only hear my father’s.

  “I’ll know,” he said, smiling, always smiling. “I always know.”

  A stinging slap made my ears ring. “Jubal!”

  My father had never hit me. It couldn’t be him.

  I looked up into Carina’s bright green eyes. A refracted shard of aquamarine shined across her left iris and made it look like she was burning from the inside out.

  “You said my name,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “The cuttle’s gone.”

  The grin felt as if it were ripping my face in half. “You said it because you were worried about me.”

  “I said it because you didn’t listen the first ten times I yelled ‘Van Zandt,’” she said, falling back into the APC’s driver seat.

  “She loves me,” I told Nickie-boy. “She was scared my consciousness had gone down into the static past with the cuttle.”

  “You did,” Carina said.

  Nick just scrubbed his hands across his ashen face.

  “It had you,” Carina said. “It had both of us.”

  “Maybe it had you. I was fine. I am fine.” I laughed to prove it. Then I pointed a finger gun at her. “But are we sure it’s gone?”

  “Nick shot it, and it slithered off.” She scowled. “We played right into its hands, stopping like that. Should’ve kept driving, outpaced it. If not for Nick—”

  “It wasn’t a conscious decision,” Nick said. “That slimy bastard was using John-Mark’s voice.”

  “Dead lover?” I said.

  Nick glared at me. “My brother, you prick. When I saw that thing climbing in here…saw its beak moving and heard his voice coming out…” He shook his head again. “I couldn’t think. I just reacted.”

  “If you hadn’t, we’d all be dead,” Carina said.

  “This is why I wanted you with us, Nickie-boy,” I said. “Carina and I can handle anything intellectual that comes our way, but every now and then it pays to have a roiling mass of testosterone and raw emotion in the group to act without thinking.”

  ***

  After we had put a little distance between us and the cuttle, we anchored the APC to scarf down some lunch and regroup. Since they were in front, Nick and Carina unlocked their seats and spun them around to face the back where I was. Probably more for the change in scenery than for the company, handsome social butterfly though I am.

  Nick pulled some dried protein rations and water bottles out of his duffel bag and handed them out. I chewed mine until all of the salt had been chewed out of it, then gulped it down. The strings of mystery protein scraped my throat all the way to my stomach. Definitely not in danger of winning any culinary awards.

  The nav screen and our wristpieces appeared to be in working order again, but after he finished eating, Nickie-boy went up through the hatch to check the location the apps were giving us against the position of the sun and whatever terrain he could see.

  “Pretty good day, all in all,” I told Carina once he was gone.

  “Looks like it,” she agreed. “You haven’t stopped smiling once.”

  “That’s when they get you.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt your cheeks?”

  “If you can’t keep grinning when your cheeks get tired, then you deserve whatever you get.”

  A Carina-nod.

  “You were trying to get the cuttle’s attention back onto you,” I said. “I heard you.”

  She flipped her hair over her shoulder. “Nick’s the one who saved us.”

  “Do you like punishment, Carina? Is that it? Do you love the way it hurts?”

  “It’s easier for me,” she said. “All of my deep, dark secrets are on my face.”

  “Good one! Bloodslinger: The Open Book. Did Nickie-boy buy that one, too? I bet it’s a best seller.”

  She tore off a strand of mystery protein and chewed it for a few seconds before saying, “I can deal with the past better than most people. It can’t hurt me.”

  “Because it’s already over,” I said, aiming a finger gun her way.

  “Because I own it.” She shot me back with a flawless finger gun and even threw in a wink for good measure.

  My Everything’s Swell smile vanished, and a grin of real delight took its place. “Have you been practicing your technique or was that incompetent finger gun-making just an act to get me to cozy up to you?”

  Her smile slammed up against the scar tissue on her left cheek.

  My fingers twitched around my water bottle, screaming to run the backs of my knuckles across those scars. Right then, I knew what would’ve happened if I had pulled her into that helicopter instead of cutting her line, and the power behind it made that poisoned knife feel like child’s play.

  “Carina—”

  The hatch opened, and Nick lowered himself back down into the APC’s passenger seat. He looked from me to his future wife.

  “Who died?” he joked. “Besides your parents, my brother, and I assume the breaker’s step-mommy?”

  I threw back my head and cackled. “You know, Nickie-boy, you keep going like this and I’ll forget to nag you about why you’re wearing that barbwire bracelet.”

  His thin lips turned down just a fraction, but he couldn’t come up with a decent response to that, so he turned to Carina. “Ready to get moving again?”

  I couldn’t find a trace of guilt or regret on her face when Carina smiled at that fishshit moron she was engaged to.

  “If we’ve got all the potty breaks out of the way,” she said, swinging her seat back around and locking it in place.

  My grin froze in a wide rictus at the sound of Nickie-boy’s chuckle. He was going to marry Carina and keep her forever and never realize what she was. Worse yet, he was going to spend the rest of his life thinking that what she could do was all in her head. That was almost as big a tragedy as my untimely death would’ve been.

  THIRTEEN

  We motored on through the evening and into the night with the magegrass scraping the hull. If not for the APC rolling with the waves, it almost would’ve felt as if we were sailing through a field of high grass. Every now and then we could hear crashing and splashing somewhere off in the distance, but we only saw the eyeshine of estuary creatures twice. Lucki
ly, neither of the eyes’ owners wanted a fight with a pair of Guild knights and the best thief in the history of the Revived Earth.

  Near midnight, a sighing noise rose from the estuary like nothing else I’d ever heard, almost a half moan. It carried on and on, sometimes reaching up until it turned shrill, other times plummeting to a low buzz.

  Without warning, the magegrass dropped away and the APC tooled into a clearing. The water there was a deep blue green, so dark that it almost glowed. I thought immediately of the Cryst riders, those open-ocean dwellers, with their thousands of words for the colors of water. They had a word for the color the ocean turned on moonless nights like this, a blue so dark and deadly that it resonated with its own black radiance—

  “Alonn,” I remembered out loud at the same time as Carina said, “Look.”

  Dark shapes moved beneath the surface of the water, somehow visible in the night, whereas daytime would have hidden them. Six or eight of them, every single one wider and longer than the amphibious vehicle we were riding in. That sighing-moaning noise intensified as they circled the clearing.

  “Creel?” I whispered. Whispering seemed like the right way to approach this situation.

  “I don’t think so,” Carina said, her voice low. “They look too fishlike.”

  “Could be shark in from the ocean,” Nick volunteered.

  “Better hope they’re not,” I said. “One of those mean bastards could snap this armored water-taxi in half.”

  As eager as we all were to get the hell out of that clearing and back to where we couldn’t see the horrors of the deep for all the magegrass, Carina didn’t crank the throttle. That would’ve made too much noise. Instead, she let our momentum quietly glide us across the open stretch of water.

  The dark shapes below kept circling, and the sigh-moan kept rising and falling. None of us so much as let a silent fart slip until we scraped back into the heavy cover of the magegrass on the other side.

  My shoulders relaxed and my body dropped back against the seat. That eerie noise faded into the background.

  “Let’s plan it so that we’re traveling back during daylight,” I said.

  ***

  The magegrass eventually thinned out and disappeared. We’d been in it so long that without its cover, I felt exposed. The wide-open night stretched out around us like a cold, empty void. Darkness in every direction.

  Nick relieved Carina at the wheel. He’d been driving for most of an hour when he leaned forward and tapped the windowscreen. “We’ve got something coming up.”

  Against the purple-black night sky, the craggy hulks he was pointing at could’ve passed for mountains. But as we drew closer, the remnants of perfect right angles and the repetition of geometric shapes gave them away as manmade.

  “Jackpot,” I said. “That’s our destination.”

  Carina stretched and checked the time on her wristpiece. “It’s only a quarter to two. Probably be a good idea to make camp somewhere on the edge of the city for tonight, then go in tomorrow with the sun and tide on our side.”

  I shifted in my seat, then shook out my shoulders. We were so close. I wanted to get in there and find that damn library. Who the hell knew how long it would take me to search through all of those ancient texts once I had them? And then to actually find the Garden of Time? I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we left civilization, so I opened my countdown app. I had between eighty-four and a hundred and seventy-four days left. But going in tonight would mean flashing lights all over the place and letting everything within eyeshine distance know there was fresh meat in town.

  “All right,” I said. “First thing in the morning, though.”

  Nickie-boy nodded as if we cared about his opinion and said, “That’ll give me a chance to rig up the diving equipment and check out that grinding between gears.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Carina said.

  I hadn’t heard anything, either, but I rolled my eyes and shook my head at Nickie. “Women, amiright? They couldn’t hear the engine fall out if it landed on their ankle and broke their leg.”

  His eyebrows scrunched up as he considered this. “Any mech chick who was listening would’ve heard it grind. It’s just Carina. She glosses over engine noise. Most people do.”

  “I’m trying to bond with you, Nick,” I said, squeezing his titanic shoulder. “Really trying. And you’re making it one of the least enjoyable man-to-man experiences I’ve ever had—and I once had to go through with gay sex to get out of a tight spot, so you can see the kind of scale I’m grading on here.”

  ***

  The place we found to beach the APC for the night was the side of a building that had fallen sometime between the end of the First Earth and the current era. There wasn’t any shortage of now horizontal structures on the edge of the city to pick from; the trouble was finding one with a relatively flat, stable surface that had a high-tide mark somewhere below a spot we could set up camp.

  While Nickie-boy tinkered under the APC’s hood, Carina and I set up our tents in its headlights’ beams. Carina and Nick’s tent was a two-person version of mine, but they hadn’t brought along any Infl8abed mattresses to make the flooring bearable.

  “Hope you guys like sleeping on First Earth concrete and steel,” I said, setting the uninflated mattress inside my tent and popping the tab. It wheezed as it filled with air.

  “We’ll survive,” Carina said, giving her tent a jerk so the frame would pop up.

  “Yeah, but will you thrive? Concrete’s hard on the knees.”

  “I’ll get Nick some kneepads.”

  I threw back my head and cackled. When I calmed down, I said, “This is just like old times, isn’t it? Except now Nickie-boy’s joined the gang.” Then, “He’s not so bad, you know.”

  She sighed. “Don’t start with this right now, Van Zandt.”

  “I think he’s taking a shine to me,” I said.

  She stopped in the middle of zipping her tent door and looked at me. “I’m asking you nicely to drop it before I have to hurt you.”

  “You know what would make me stop pursuing your significant other? Tell me about your feelings for me. Admit that you fell in love with me in Soam and you’re still not over it.”

  “I’ve never had anything more than friendly feelings toward you, Van Zandt. Whatever else you’ve convinced yourself of—”

  “Honestly, I think you take him for granted,” I said. “You’ve been leading him around by his dick for so long that it’s made you soft. That’s why you jumped all over handling me as soon as we met. You needed the challenge. Deep down in your predator’s heart, you were still bloodthirsty. You wanted back out there to hunt. But I won. Now you’re back because you can’t get enough of me. We both know it. Nickie-boy knows it. The only thing left to do is say it.”

  Her eyes narrowed to predatory slits, a glint of glacial swamp ice in her irises, but she didn’t open her mouth.

  I grinned. “Yeah, you’ve only been back for a month or so, but already you’re taking him for granted. Don’t worry about that, though, sister. No, don’t you worry yourself about that at all. I can fix that. You know what they say about not appreciating what you have until you lose it.”

  That did it. She pounced.

  “You want to hear what I really thought of you in Soam, Van Zandt? The truth? I saw right through your act—I still see right through it. I know you hate yourself, but you can’t admit it or your whole little candyglass world falls apart and you end up doing the high dive off of the nearest tall building. I saw your walls—so strong and impenetrable from the inside, and so transparent from the outside—and I realized how alone you really are.”

  “That’s rich coming from the most closed-off knight in the Guild. Was it your mom who made you like that, Bloodslinger? All those life lessons, all that making you tough, just so you could turn into the Standalone Knight?”

  “And do you want to hear the best part?” Carina kept talking as if I hadn’t said anythi
ng at all. “I felt sorry for you. I wanted to be your friend the way somebody might want to feed a starving dog, and I got bit. But as much as I wanted to hate you, as angry as I wanted to be, all I could feel was pity. It must be terrible to be trapped inside of yourself like that.”

  “Did you really go home every day and cry alone in your room, or did you feel like doing it but stop yourself because you knew dear old Mom knew you felt like doing it? Were you scared sometimes that she might be reading your mind? What’d you do to block her out before she could get in?”

  Carina’s lips twisted into a smile. “Where’d your mommy go, Van Zandt? The one who said she’d never leave. Where did she go?”

  “Headfirst into a bog off Copper River,” I said. “How’d it feel when Mommy kicked the bucket? Were you sad, but not sad enough to prove to everybody else that you were human? Did it freak Daddy out how fast his little Bloodslinger got over it? Did he wonder whether you ever really loved Mommy at all? Did you start to wonder? Can you love, Bloodslinger? Can you feel anything, or do you just go through the motions so nobody realizes what a freak you really are?”

  “I don’t care what they think about me,” she fired back. “I feel more than they ever will!”

  “I know you do!” I stabbed a finger at her. “You’re just like me, Carina! We’re just alike, and we don’t have to give a fuck what any of them think about us! We’re better than that! We’re better than them!”

  “The electricity is about to go out,” my flame kigao said.

  “Shit!” I stomped my foot. Just when Carina and I were finally getting somewhere.

  Carina’s eyebrows drew together in confusion, and her head cocked warily at me. She shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet.

  In our sudden silence, the kigao’s voice sounded loud. “The electricity is about to go out.”

  Something screamed. Not human at all. A chitinous scissor-claw sliced through the APC’s headlights toward Carina’s neck, shedding droplets of water like rain.

  “Carina!” Before I even finished yelling, she hit the concrete and rolled away.

  The giant creel screamed again, vibrating the stumpy chelicerae around its maw. Eight of its twelve legs were pulling it up onto the building beside us.