by eden Hudson
“I know you’re not a murderer, Van Zandt. Was she alive once? That’s what I want to know.”
“I can’t produce her birth record, and I don’t know her name,” I said. “But she was alive once. That’s how it works. All kigaos are the burning souls of murdered innocents.”
“Was she one of your father’s victims?”
I nodded. “I think so.”
“Does she look like Yisu did?”
“All flame kigaos look basically the same. Burning, fiery humanoids.”
“But you said you recognized her as one of your father’s victims?”
“Name another murdered innocent who would be hanging around a serial killer.”
Carina studied the road as she considered this. “When did she first appear?”
“What in our history together makes you think I would be able to answer that accurately?” I asked. “Do you even understand how relative time is?”
“Relative to when you finished playing through Tsunami Tsity, when did she first warn you about something? Before or after?”
Ah, there it was. “You think she’s a figment of my imagination, stolen from a VR game.”
“No, I’m trying to create a timeline,” Carina said. “You played the game when it first came out, right? That would give us a specific date to work from.”
I looked askance at her. “Why? What are you going to do, cross-reference the release date with my father’s assumed whereabouts at the time and all the missing women in that area?”
“It might give us some clues,” Carina said. “Why did she choose you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s not like she can tell me. The only phrase she knows is ‘The electricity is about to go out.’”
Carina hesitated midstride, glancing my way, then started again as if she hadn’t missed a step.
“The electricity is about to go out? Why does she say that?”
“That wasn’t part of the deal, sister,” I said, shooting her a wink and a finger gun.
“You said you would tell me about her if I played through Tsunami Tsity.”
“No, I said I’d tell you how I knew something was about to happen before it did, and I told you: My flame kigao warns me. My end of the verbal contract has been fulfilled.”
“Don’t do that, Van Zandt,” Carina said, grabbing my arm and turning me to face her. “Don’t shut me out just because it’s easier.” Her green eyes drilled into mine. “You want to communicate with me, I know you do. I can feel it. So, communicate. I’m listening.”
Behind Carina, my flame kigao shook her head, frantic.
“You’re listening?” I grinned. “You’re on my side? Maybe you’re even like me and we are in agreement?”
Her eyebrows drew down. “I’m not handling you.”
“If that’s true, then why does she keep warning me not to talk to you? Tell me what’s so dangerous about opening up to you.”
Carina considered this. “Maybe she looks out for your emotional well-being, too. Maybe she’s afraid that the one person you think you can let in is the one person who can do the most damage.”
My kigao spun and clawed at her burning face.
I waited to see if Carina would assure me that she would never hurt me, but she didn’t.
So, I asked, “Is she right?”
Carina gave me a small smile, a touch of sadness around her eyes. “Of course she is. When you let someone inside your guard, they can reach all your vital organs. But sometimes—if you survive—the damage is worth it. Sometimes you both become something better for finding each other.”
This time when that poisoned knife slipped into my gut, warmth spread from it, radiating up into my chest. It felt like a burning hand reaching down to pull me up out of the Tsunami Tsity mud, like an embrace, like a slender mahogany throat bared for me to tear open or to kiss.
“This world isn’t good enough for creatures like us,” I told Carina.
She smiled, looking away from me as she swiped her long dark hair away from her scars. When it was safely tucked behind her ear, her fingers lingered on her neck where I knew she had felt the kiss.
TWENTY-TWO:
Jubal
Those little Ferg and Gam freaks followed us the rest of the morning. Whenever one strayed too close to me, I stomped on it. Not because I thought it would work, but because they seemed to find the action hilarious. They were right, it was pretty funny.
With the lack of snow, mountains, crevasses, and freezing cold to slow us down, Carina and I covered the six miles to the target area in under two hours. Neither one of us mentioned the suspicious lack of increasingly intense temporal anomalies out loud, but the thought hung in the air like the damp chill that should’ve clung to everything down there.
Not long after we crossed into the target area, the ice wall just off the edge of the road turned to stone. Chunks of boulder and falls of pebbles littered the ground at the base of the ancient cliffside, and washes of mud flowed across the asphalt, following streams of trickling runoff. Above our heads, trees leaned over the edge of the angular rock faces. Curtains of gnarled roots coiled and twisted from their bases like an army of thousand-tentacled octopi climbing down to attack.
Every so often, caves cut into the rock wall beside us. Since we were within range of the First Earth coordinates for Time Garden Caverns, whenever we came upon one of these caves, Carina or I climbed up and shined our wristpiece lights inside—another action the Fergs and Gams mimicked—but none of the holes went deeper than a few feet, and none of them held water or ice in their depths that might be the physical manifestation of Time.
“Break for lunch?” Carina asked, after a loud growl from my stomach set the Fergs and Gams rolling on the ground, kicking their feet.
I shook my head and kept walking. “We’re so close. Let’s skip the rations and gag down a couple Qal-O-Runs. We’ve got to be practically on top of it by now.”
When she didn’t answer, I looked over and caught her staring at me sidelong.
“You haven’t been very hungry this trip,” she said.
I grinned. “You’re worried about me.”
Carina didn’t smile, but the lines in her face were soft. Fascinated. As if she were looking at something she wanted to study forever.
“Not worried,” she said. “Theorizing. I think you’re happy right now. I think that’s why you haven’t been hungry.”
“Or I’m so backed up that there’s no more room in my intestines for my stomach to empty. We’ve been living on wilderness rations and sweating out all our hydration for days. You’d think with all the fiber they advertise, the Qal-O-Runs would keep us flowing, but I haven’t taken a dump since we left the dispatch station. What about you? What level of constipation would you say you’re at now?”
She snorted and shook her head. “Sometimes you’re so…”
“Gorgeous. No, brilliant. No, ruggedly handsome, but at the same time, strangely enigmatic.”
“You make me forget about the real world,” she said. “Responsibilities. The job. Everything. It’s a nice escape.”
“By ‘everything,’ you mean Nick,” I said.
“Sometimes. But you always bring him up again.”
I felt her eyes searching my face for an explanation. I caught them and held them, not blinking.
“Because I’m not an escape,” I told her. “I’m reality. And when you choose one of us—him or me—I want you to remember that you chose.”
“Do I have to choose?” she asked. “We can’t be friends while Nick and I are together?”
I shook my head. “We can never be friends, Carina. Creatures like us, it’s not what we’re made for.”
She considered this as we walked. Before she could respond, something up ahead caught her attention. I followed her line of sight.
To the left of the road was an ancient banner stretched over a huge rectangular wooden frame. The banner had probably been brightly colored when it was new, its ora
nges, yellows, and blacks designed to attract the eyes of passing First Earth travelers and speleoenthusiasts, but now it hung in grimy tatters, its lettering just barely decipherable.
Time Garden Caverns
Cave Tours – Gem Shop – Genuine Ozark Fudge
Ahead ½ Mile Then First Right at the Light!
“What does it say?” she asked.
I grinned. “It’s a sign.”
***
By what a less acute mind might think of as a “miraculous coincidence,” our icy corridor followed the asphalt for another half a mile, came to an intersection littered with the remains of an ancient three-light traffic lamp, then took a sharp turn that no glacial melt or wind erosion could explain away to follow the road on the right. The road winding away from the intersection looked as fresh as new blacktop, and along each side, primitive green grasses had grown tall in spite of the lack of photo to synthesize with. Additionally, the temperature felt closer to a warm spring afternoon than the icy cathedral ceiling would suggest.
I checked nonchalantly for my flame kigao. “Well, we wanted anomalies and we didn’t want to dig.”
“Right.” Carina unslung her backpack, fished out the chain-driven sword she’d swapped her knuckgun for, and clipped it onto her belt.
We shucked off another layer of jackets and stuffed them into our bags, then headed down the road.
After a few serpentine twists and turns, the icy walls opened up onto a gravel parking lot that the runoff from the ice cap somehow hadn’t washed away in the last nine centuries. Bulky-looking First Earth vehicles were scattered throughout, ranging in condition from Old Money to Family of Eight on the Only Vacation They Can Afford. Butted up against the rocky hillside at the far end of the lot stood a long low building covered in cedar siding that hadn’t faded to an elderly gray and ancient roofing tiles as bright green as if they’d just rolled off a First Earth assembly line. The glass in the windows shined clean and clear in the dull glow from the ice. The sign over the door proclaimed TIME GARDEN CAVERNS & GEM SHOP in paint that wasn’t peeling.
“Place looks like it was abandoned yesterday,” Carina said, her voice low.
I realized something. “Our entourage is gone.”
Carina looked at me, confused.
“The little freaks,” I said, gesturing at the empty ground around our feet. “The Fergs and Gams. They’re gone.”
“Or they’re staying invisible,” she said.
And yet still no warning from my flame kigao.
“Well, we’re safe to go inside, at least,” I said.
As we crossed the parking lot, I took pictures of the perfectly preserved First Earth vehicles. A few had ancient paper cups in their console holders, sunshades, and tourism-geared brochures. One was littered with takeout trash. I knew some museums, private collectors, and First Earth motorheads who would cream their shorts to get their hands on these time capsules.
When I finished, Carina had stopped outside the double doors with her hand on the knob. She was staring through the window.
“What?” I went over and leaned over her shoulder.
I’d expected a dark, shadowy interior, but cylindrical bulbs showered the place in harsh white light. Glass shelves covered with polished rocks, slices of vibrant agate, and trinket-set gemstones divided the room into rows. And walking around the gem shop, between the shelves, were mud people.
I didn’t do anything crass like jump, but I did take a closer look to make sure I was seeing what my eyes had originally relayed to my brain.
Yep. Mud people.
They weren’t moving. Each sloppy, slightly-larger-than-human shape seemed to be frozen in place, perfectly still. A few held gemstones or browsed the shelves. Two stood on one side of the counter facing another one on the opposite side, in a muddy display of retail interaction. One short one was pointing at a display of rock-candy-filled jars while three other short ones inspected a display of cheap plastic toys.
I wiped my damp palms on my khakis, then pushed Carina’s hand off the doorknob and turned it myself.
It was unlocked.
“Because it’s regular business hours,” I said, glancing down at the sign in the corner of the window.
“What?” Carina asked.
I shook my head and pulled the door open.
None of the mud people moved.
No flame kigao.
I cleared my throat and elbowed Carina. “Ladies with swords first.”
She shrugged off her bag and set it by the door, then raised her sword. She went in slowly, green eyes cutting from one mud person to the next. Every step was silent and carefully calculated. The black onca prowled across the surface of my mind.
The mud people stayed frozen. I took off my bag and left it, too, for ease of movement. Then I ghosted in behind her, silent as a heartache even in those clunky snow boots. The only sound was the buzzing of the First Earth lamps overhead.
I went over to the mud person holding an amethyst geode that had a pair of pewter wolves inside like a cave.
The mud person looked slick and slimy, as if it were made from the stickiest muck from the bottom of a river, but when I tried to stick my finger into its shoulder, I hit solid rock. I tapped it, then wiped my hand down the back of its head.
“It’s calcareous,” I said. “Same as the speleothems in a cave. Crunchy candy shell, gooey human center.”
Carina didn’t lower her sword. “What do you think happened to them?”
“Either the end of the First Earth got them or the Seraph did,” I said, thinking back to the ancient texts documenting the massacres at the Garden of Many Summers. “Not sure how the cave juice turned them into human flowstones, though. You’d think it would’ve coated everything. And if it was just an organic/inorganic distinction, then those hides over there should’ve been affected, too.”
She glanced at the display of fuzzy furs under the sign Cave Pets – Pet us like real animals! Each one was still as fluffy as if it’d come off some tiny mammal yesterday.
“There wasn’t any mention of a mysterious infectious disease in these parts?” she asked.
“Now who wishes she owned a ventilator?” I teased.
“Still not me.” She reached out and ran one finger down the arm of the mud person closest. Her finger must’ve come away damp, because she rubbed it against the pad of her thumb.
Beside the counter, I found a map of the cave system. I studied it for a few seconds, burning the tunnels, landmarks, entrances, and exits into my brain out of habit.
Then I went around the counter to see what the mud shopkeeper had been up to at the end of the world. A metal drawer stood open from the bottom of the computer. Inside the drawer, little stacks of ancient fiat currency lay in rectangular compartments like stacks of babies in mass graves.
“Do you think this’ll disintegrate if I take it outside range of the anomaly?” I asked Carina.
“Are you seriously going to take that?”
“I was just considering it before, but now that I know you’re incredulous about it, I’m definitely going to.”
She rolled her eyes.
Something across the room caught my attention. There was a blond wooden door on the south wall—the wall that butted up against the hillside. Taped to it at eye-height was a faded sign that said Please give your passes to attendant before entering.
Carina followed me over.
I turned the door handle. It wasn’t locked, either.
On the other side was a small dark room. Rows of black padded metal chairs faced a boxy ancient screen at the front. Eleven mud people sat facing the screen, where one mud person stood frozen mid-gesture, pointing.
“Looks like a briefing,” Carina said.
I shook my head. “Pre-tour infogram.”
She lifted her sword back to the ready.
“What’s the matter, Bloodslinger?” I nudged her sword arm. “Scared of the dark?”
She smiled. “Prepared for the dark.”
<
br /> “Then I won’t make you wait,” I said, gesturing to a door behind the frozen tour guide.
“Ladies with swords first,” she said, leading the way.
When we got to the door, Carina and I both looked over our shoulders at the stationary voyeurs. Their featureless faces weren’t quite turned our way, but it still felt as if they were staring at us. I didn’t want to take my eyes off them.
Carina nodded at me, letting me know she would keep watch while I turned my back.
I opened the door. A blast of colder air blew out of the blackness. The smell of damp rock and frigid spring water lit up my senses.
For a split second, a craving for the warm, spicy smell of PCM fire rooted me to the spot. My throat felt thick, almost choked with the need just to smell it.
I gave myself a mental shake and stepped inside. A line of yellow lights led down the right side of a steep stone staircase. Whoever owned the cave must’ve carved it to make the descent more accessible.
“Watch your step,” I translated from a yellow-and-black sign. “They’re not liable for accidents.”
At the bottom of the stairs, the path evened out into a walkway, and the cave opened up into a huge gallery. More of the yellow lights, hidden strategically behind smaller formations, illuminated the big-money features. Stone curtains had grown in impossible undulations. Majestic columns stretched from the ceiling to flowstone shelves lining the walls. Massive stalactites hung from the bottoms of the shelves and dripped into the pool at the bottom of the cave.
Excitement bubbled up from the pit of my gut. I leaned over the metal pipe acting as a railing and looked down at the water.
“Easy,” Carina said, grabbing a handful of my tourist shirt. “That pipe doesn’t look very stable, and this rock is slippery.”
I grinned and pointed down. “Do you see that, Carina? That’s what we’re here for. That’s physical Time.”
“Allegedly,” she said.
“That could be Months down there,” I said. “It could be Centuries.”
“It could be water.”
I rolled my eyes and got off the railing. “Sure, now you’re the pragmatist. What happened to Stupidly Romantic Carina?”
