Garden of Time (A Jubal Van Zandt Novel Book 4)

by eden Hudson

  Exactly the way her yelling wasn’t.

  I went back to lugging my bags down the stairs. “Especially the way the wind screams at the top of its lungs and drives ice chips hard enough to lodge them in your hypodermis, amiright?”

  Farrelli belted out another laugh. A second later, her heavy treads followed me down the stairs.

  Over all that woman’s noise, I couldn’t hear Carina’s predatory stalking. I checked over my shoulder to make sure she was coming. Carina gave one last searching look out the window, then followed.

  As we filed down into the lower level, the howling of the blizzard became muffled. Like Farrelli had said, the majority of the station had been built down into the ice to take maximum advantage of the cheap insulation. UV lights lined the ceilings at medically approved intervals to stave off the depression caused by living under a year-round blanket of cold and darkness, but the place reminded me of a symbio rhizome. The lower level had that same heavy stillness that you can only find underground.

  After Carina drank a few cups of chicory muck masquerading as coffee, and I downed several mugs of hot water to defrost the ice in my veins, Farrelli took us on a quick tour of the communications room, kitchen, common area, rec room, and sleeping quarters. The other half of the station’s permanent team greeted us there.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, sticking out his hand to me. “I’m Manfred Bly, the station meteorologist.”

  I ignored his hand and eyed the knot of hair poking up from the top of his head. It stood there like a monument to the follicles that had been shaved away from the sides. I didn’t trust it.

  Carina leaned around me and shook the hand connected to the man connected to the bun.

  “Thank you for graciously sharing your station with us tonight,” she said.

  “Oh, pshaw!” Man Bun Bly waved her gratitude away. “We love having guests. We don’t get nearly enough of them down here. And to tell the truth, we’ve got ulterior motives for extending a homey atmosphere. If we can convince you guys not to go out onto the ice cap—”

  “You can’t,” I said. “Not looking like that.”

  Man Bun’s goobery smile faltered, but his mouth kept talking. “—because the, uh, the danger out there—”

  “No one is going to hear anything you say with that bun staring at them,” I told it.

  “Please forgive my associate,” Carina said. She tapped her temple. “He’s syphilitic.”

  “That’s rich, coming from the woman who gave it to me,” I said. “Not stepping out on me, my rotting left nut. I suppose I got it by immaculate infection?”

  Before Carina could retaliate, Farrelli grabbed her gut and burst out in another raucous laughing fit. It was a good time not to have aural upgrades.

  Man Bun added a few half-hearted chuckles to the commotion. The look on his face said he was doing it more to seem like he could take a joke than out of any authentic sense of humor.

  “Ah, cards, the both of you,” Farrelli said once she calmed down. “It’s good to have some new blood around. Bly’s right, though, we can’t just let you wander out there without any sort of warning. No looter who’s come through here has ever come back. Even had a scientist wander off too far once, got lost on the ice.”

  Carina met the hefty stationmaster’s eyes. “Have you ever recovered any of the bodies?”

  “Not equipped for search and rescue,” Farrelli said. “And even if we were, it’s not our job to risk life and limb to bring back the frozen remains of a fool who was warned not to go.”

  Her eyes jumped from Carina to me, as if waiting for one of us to say that she’d scared us into dropping our mission and going home on the next icebreaker.

  “Good news,” I said, turning to Carina. “Sounds like there’s plenty of unspoiled meat out there in case our rations run low. Or we get tired of eating QalORun bars.”

  ELEVEN:

  Nick

  It became clear fast that Nick wasn’t going to be allowed to sneak off and talk to Het while the Tect was there. Re Suli kept him close by to answer questions about his schematics.

  “This’s good,” the Tect general said, tracing the drawing with the backs of her lifeless fingers. “But that First Earth steel your brujahs salvaged us from the jungle behind Giku’s run out. The alloys we’re gainin’ from the raids is barely enough to outfit the new faithful.”

  “That’s ’cause y’all ain’t using it efficiently,” Re Suli said. She tapped the top schematic. “Looky here. He outfitted the whole leviathan with less than two tons a metal.” She glanced at Nick. “Nicolai Éloy Beausoleil, tell me truly how much poly-alloy you can make outta two hundred and eighty tons a First Earth steel if’n you’re workin’ at the best a yer ability.”

  “Two-thirty or two-forty,” Nick bit out, immediately relieving the compulsion. “You lose a few dozen tons in processing and waste, but with the right machinery, not much more.”

  “And how many bodies would you be able to outfit with them fancy cyborgcromantics if’n you had that many tons a poly?” Re Suli asked.

  He seized upon the fact that she hadn’t ordered him to tell her what he would do if working to the best of his ability, just assumed that stipulation would carry over to this new question. Calculations reeled through his mind. Intentional downgrades, flaws, and weaknesses Guild knights could exploit in battle.

  “Assuming a similar framework to the general’s—” Nick estimated a weight based on her form-hardened First Earth steel frame. “—around six thousand.”

  Re Suli grinned. “Ain’t he cute? Now, Nicolai Éloy Beausoleil, scrap that ‘similar framework’ nonsense and assume you’re designing them cyborgcromantics from scratch. Make ’em just as pretty and efficient as you would if’n you were gonna outfit yerself, then tell me truly how many you can outfit like that.”

  “Fifteen thousand to twenty thousand,” he growled, frustrated at having been seen through. “But that’s not accounting for any variations in design. Could be more or less if she wanted different foot soldiers or scouts or tanks.”

  Intense relief flooded him. He gritted his teeth, trying not to show it.

  “Time to really wow ’er now, sugar,” the witch said, beaming conspiratorially at him. “Nicolai Éloy Beausoleil—”

  Nick cringed. He was getting to hate the sound of his own name.

  “—workin’ to the best a yer abilities, design Sol a brand-spankin’-new set of body armor that’ll make them fancy suits yer child-murderin’ buddies wear look like cheesecloth and sticks.” She snapped her fingers as if remembering something. “Oh, and Sol’s a full-body cripple—thanks to them aforementioned child-murderers. Can’t even stand up on her own. So, it’s gonna need some kinda frame to hold her up, too.”

  TWELVE:

  Jubal

  That night, Farrelli fixed us a supper that explained her waistline—savory stew with heavily buttered hotbread. For all the racket the woman made, she sure as balls knew how to cook.

  Outside, the blizzard continued to rage. After my third helping of hotbread, I got Man Bun’s attention.

  “You’re ostensibly a meteorologist,” I said. “What’re the chances of seeing clear skies anytime soon?”

  He hurried to force down the bite he’d just taken, a feat almost as uncomfortable to watch as it must’ve been to swallow.

  “Oh, this’ll all be over by morning,” he said. He took a quick drink and cleared his throat. “The squalls out here run on a loop. Perfect intervals. The blizzard goes on for sixteen hours to the minute, then stops dead for eight, then blizzard again. They don’t move in or out—just hit full-force, then disappear. I can show you the radar if you’re interested. It’s the strangest thing you’ll ever see. We’ve been studying it for more than a decade now, and it still has us scratching our heads.”

  “The side of them, anyway,” I said, glaring at his man bun to make sure it was still where I’d left it. I started to lift my stew bowl for a sip, then froze. “You’re talking about
the Totten Effect. A twenty-four-hour period of perfectly repeating weather patterns? Only ever observed at this pole? As if the same day were echoing itself over and over again.”

  “Righty-o,” he said, nodding. “I know a lot of folks who’d kill to figure out what’s causing…”

  I tuned out whatever he was wagging his ridiculous hairball about.

  An identifiable temporal loop. Of course the Garden of Time would be located nearby!

  I’d read about the Totten Effect years ago when the discovering scientist—whom the pattern had been named after—had published a paper on it. Why hadn’t I made the connection before this? My brain is light-years ahead of nearly every other human I’ve ever met. I should’ve realized the Garden of Time was down here as soon as I first came across the legend. How was it that I hadn’t? Was the PCM causing some sort of mental deterioration?

  No, it wasn’t the PCM. I wasn’t great with time, but I remembered coming across the Garden of Time legend shortly after hearing that Carina was back in Emden from Soam. That was the reason I hadn’t made the connection. I’d been so excited at the prospect of seeing her again that my brain’s vision had contracted down to a pinhole.

  The only person who can catch you is you.

  “Truer words, Lorne,” I mumbled into my stew.

  The piping hot concoction poured down my throat, slowly burning through the fist of panic that had clenched around my stomach. Missing one simple, obvious connection had almost gotten me killed. The trick now would be operating at full capacity while finding the Garden of Time and juggling the plan to make Carina’s reality the right one.

  I glanced across the table at her. Predictably, she was busy drawing Man Bun out of his awkwardness-foreskin by asking him questions that made him feel smarter than her.

  “Do you have any theories on why the snow doesn’t build up?” she asked. “I don’t have any experience with snow, but an eighteen-hour blizzard every day should bury the aboveground portion of the station a hundred times over every year, shouldn’t it?”

  Man Bun’s dull, crap-colored eyes glittered as he leaned toward her. “That’s part of the mystery! Totten originally theorized that the wind was scouring it away every day—”

  “But it wasn’t,” I said, making a more educated guess than he was capable of. “The accumulation disappears every morning as soon as the blizzard stops. Poof, and no one knows why.”

  “Uh—well, yeah,” Man Bun said, the wind dying in his sails. He glanced back down at his food.

  “How did they prove it wasn’t the wind?” Carina asked, her voice carefully modulated to sound as if she wasn’t asking out of pity, but genuine interest.

  Man Bun took the bait. “They’ve done recordings, before and after sample analyzation, one team even spent the night watching for any sign of blow-off…”

  I stared at Carina with my eyes slightly wider than usual until I got her attention.

  She gave me the smallest of micro brow-twitches. What?

  I gave it back with emphasis. What do you think? The Garden of Time is the reason the snow disappears every morning. The ice cap is experiencing the same day over and over.

  Duh, she nod-shrugged. But I still like to play with my food.

  “Uh, did I say something?” Man Bun’s eyes bounced from Carina to me. “Or—”

  “No, Bly, no.” Farrelli waved him off. “It’s nothing to do with you at all. My grandparents were the same. Always having conversations the rest of us weren’t privy to. Just like an old married couple, aren’t you?”

  I lifted my stew bowl in a toast. “I don’t know about marriage, but if Carina here could cook like you, Farrelli, I wouldn’t complain every time she gave me chlamydia.”

  ***

  The dispatch station was too small for Carina and me to have a room to ourselves. I didn’t want to sleep in the same room as that man bun, but I also didn’t trust a guy who would wear his hair in a topknot to spend the night that close to Carina and keep his penis to himself, so I called dibs on bunking with Bly before he could suggest otherwise.

  Ol’ Man Bun didn’t seem too upset by the preemptive cockblock.

  “I’m on a night schedule this week,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder toward the hall that led to the weather-monitoring equipment. “I’ll be buzzing around monitoring the incoming data until after breakfast, so feel free to take my bed.”

  I nodded. “Great, that will save me having to suggest you let me have it.” I clasped my hands and pointed a double-finger gun at Farrelli. “Now, Stationmaster, I believe I saw a trundle bed in your room earlier that Carina might be able to use?”

  “Right you are,” the big woman agreed. “Doesn’t get much use—once a year when the station inspector stops through—but the bedding’s clean and already made up.”

  Carina shot me a not-quite-concealed quizzical smirk. I grinned back at her.

  After our little party broke up, I was alone in Man Bun’s living quarters. I kicked off my sneaks, flopped backward onto the bed, and checked my SilverPlatter app to see how the plan was progressing.

  Carina had three messages waiting for her, one from the project head in the Guild’s mech shop, one from the Knight Superior, and one from Nickie-boy’s mom.

  The project head’s message was short and sweet:

  If you’re in contact with Beausoleil, have him contact me ASAP.

  The Knight Superior’s was long-winded with a touch of salt:

  Beausoleil aside for the moment, the investigations committee turned up a positive ID on the head of the Tect your team brought in. Om Parun—29/M/Soami. Last seen alive nineteen months ago in Courten, Soam. No record of him ever setting foot in Emden alive. We’re sending unspec down to find out how he got all the way up here. We can’t send you back in, obviously, but we need you to brief the team on ingratiating themselves with the Soamis. Can you make 16:00 tomorrow?

  And Nickie-boy’s mom sounded downright frantic:

  I can’t get Nicolai to answer my messages. Was he called out with you? First Mishael, now him. What is going on?

  After some deliberation, I sent through all three messages without changing their timestamps. The laptic connection down here was almost nonexistent, so the late delivery wouldn’t look fishy, and there was no way Carina could make it back to Taern in time to brief the unspec team.

  Even if Carina could make it back in time, she would realize that the briefing itself was likely an attempt to draw her into an interrogation on Nickie-boy’s whereabouts. In addition to unconscionable levels of wet work, knights in the Unspecified branch of the Guild—lovingly known as “unspec”—also did the subtlety work the more narrow-minded knights couldn’t or would do: deep cover, info-gathering, interrogation, and all sorts of other psychological fuckery. They were the manufactured version of Carina and me, cheap imitations of our inborn manipulative genius, but standing in a roomful of them would be the same as being under a microscope. If the Knight Superior hadn’t already asked them to analyze Carina for any suspicious behavior that might relate to Nickie-boy, then he was an even bigger moron than he let on.

  Additionally, I didn’t want Carina to miss out on the fun fact that the spider-head Tect that had attacked us in that burnt-out skinner village a few weeks ago wasn’t an Emdoni pagan after all, but a good ol’ Soami heathen. The threads of every knot seemed to lead to Courten these days.

  With all the incoming business taken care of, I checked Carina’s outgoing messages for anything suspicious. That was a quick job—she hadn’t sent any since the request to see Nickie’s report.

  I scratched at the stubble on my jaw. Her lack of outgoing communication was a little surprising, but it made sense. It wasn’t like Carina had any friends besides me to begin with. Our kind never did. When you feel as much contempt for the rest of the world as we do, something like Nickie-boy’s sudden one-eighty from soppy fiancé to disgraced fugitive would’ve made even trying to act like she cared about the rest of the idiots out ther
e pointless and stupid.

  Fortunately, she had me to poke her with a stick until she quit her pouting.

  JVZ 23:01:48 How’s my matchmaking? Has Farrelli put the moves on you yet?

  CX 23:03:16 That’s what your sleeping arrangement obsession was about? I thought you were afraid I might want to bed down with the meteorologist.

  JVZ 23:03:55 Man Bun? That’s a good one. You’re too catty to bunk with any woman vainer than you.

  CX 23:04:21 Funny, I’ve never actually heard a pot call a kettle vain before.

  JVZ 23:05:33 I’m not vain, I’m pretty. There’s a difference. I don’t spend all day preening, I roll out of bed looking like this. That topknot takes him a half hour to groom, minimum.

  CX 23:06:02 You seem to know a lot about this hairstyle. Did the greatest thief in the Revived Earth used to have a bun?

  JVZ 23:06:33 No, Carina, I have two functioning testicles.

  When she replied, I could hear the laughter in her message.

  CX 23:07:59 Goodnight, Van Zandt.

  I grinned.

  JVZ 23:08:10 Goodnight, sleep tight, let me know if Farrelli likes to bite.

  She didn’t send anything back. After a few minutes, I did another quick check of her real-time display. Her screen had timed out with no new action.

  I pictured Carina turning over and falling asleep with a smile stretching from the unblemished mahogany of her right cheek to the wall of scars on her left. The image stayed with me as I dozed off.

  ***

  The sound of footsteps rocketed me awake. I kept my eyes closed and measured my breaths, listening. A man’s exaggerated yawning followed him across the room. The door to the bathroom creaked open, then shut.