Flotsam

by R J Theodore

  “Time to get off this rock,” she said to Meran.

  The woman’s bright blue eyes flashed with comprehension but also a challenge. Talis’s will might be influencing Meran through the ring, but it was plain that Meran had her own desires and motivations lurking beneath the surface.

  Onaya Bone could deal with her. It truly was time to get a move on.

  Talis and Meran half-dragged Dug into the crowd, which parted in reverence, opening a straight line for the city gate leading back to the docks and the sanity of Talis’s ship.

  The guard spoke again. “We will wash his offenses from our records here, Hakesha. But other islands may still attempt to carry out his sentence. The scars cannot be washed clean.”

  Talis stopped to catch an agonizing breath. Dug’s weight was compressing her posture, making him feel as large as a Breaker man. She nodded and accepted her jacket back from the woman. “I understand,” she said.

  Meran shifted, putting all of Dug’s weight onto Talis’s shoulder. Talis’s leg buckled and she nearly went down. The guard stepped in, saving Talis from the scream of pain that she’d held back only by biting down hard on her lip. She backed up a few steps, holding her side with the opposite arm and glared at Meran through the white flashes in her vision.

  Reaching out, Meran placed a hand on each of Dug’s shoulder blades. A murmur started in the crowd, rippling outward. Then an eerie hush, as the woman’s hands glowed blue. The crisscrossing lines of Dug’s scars and the blood seeping from his wounds glowed to match. The lines of the veins beneath his skin were dark against the illumination that filled his torso.

  When the light faded and Meran lowered her arms, Dug’s back was a smooth, flawless expanse of dark skin over toned muscles. The tattoo on his arm, once deliberately ruined, was reformed, looking as though it had been created with more skill than it originally had.

  The silence lasted another pair of heartbeats. Then it was overtaken by a roar. Amazement and awe surged through the crowd, and the press of bodies came at them, fervor renewed. Meran ducked under Dug’s other arm again, and the guards formed a wedge to escort them across the wide expanse of frenzied Bone desperately seeking Meran’s benediction. Words holier than ‘Hakesha’ rose up from the crowd and became a disjointed chant, as arms reached out like tentacles, catching on Talis’s hair and the loose fabric of Meran’s clothes.

  The crowd pressed against them from all sides and Dug began to stir. He saw the guard first and struggled against her support. Talis tried to move to calm him, but was jostled off balance and ended up knocking her forehead against Dug’s nose. That got his attention, anyway. He recognized her, his eyes were clear, and he shifted his weight to support himself. The guard looked to Talis, who nodded.

  Dug blinked away his unconsciousness and put a hand on Talis’s shoulder at the base of her neck. “Talis.” He put his other hand on the side of her face, his calloused fingers rough against her cheek. The cuts over his eyes were gone. The life had come back to his features, but his eyes were pained. “You should not have come. I am ready.”

  “No time for that.” Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat to try again. “You’re not going to find a way out here.”

  She raised her arm to show him the brand. “We’re not the ones Onaya Bone is furious with.”

  He maintained his balance as the guards were forced back into them by a swell in the crowd. Reached out to grip her arm, pulled it closer for inspection. She hissed as her skin stretched. “Careful, mind you.”

  He let go, and she held her hand over the burn, pressing it as if that would help the pain. For the first time, he seemed fully aware of the crowd. Of hands and faces turned toward Meran, and then of Meran herself.

  “We’ve had a busy day,” Talis said, trying to cut off a poorly timed line of questioning.

  He nodded, eyeing the guards who protected them. Probably the same guards who had tied him up on the platform. “You’re hurt,” he said.

  She almost laughed. Him tied up there, surrounded by alien corpses, a surging crowd at his feet, and he was worried about her bruises. “Well, we gave better than we got.”

  But had they? Silus Cutter was dead. She swallowed that thought unchewed.

  They were almost halfway to the gate, but the crowd forced their pace to a shuffling crawl. Dug looked down at the brand on her arm again.

  And then he noticed his own arm, smooth and free of scars. He ran his fingers across the skin, tracing the lines and symbols of his tattoo as if he’d never seen it before.

  Talis took a hit to her ribcage and stumbled into Dug, gritting her teeth and biting down on a growl. The crowd was getting to be a bit much.

  “If we ever get back to the ship, I’ll fill you in on what you missed,” she promised him.

  Meran pushed forward, past them, past the guards. The crowd surrounded her, and for a moment Talis lost sight of the woman, even the blue light tracing across her skin. Talis urged Dug forward, shouldering her way through the masses and clenching her jaw against the pain as she fought the renewed fervor of the crowd around them.

  Then Meran reappeared, her head and shoulders rising out of the crowd. Hands tried to cling to her as she seemed to levitate. The onlookers in front of Talis and Dug parted, and she saw the hard-packed sand of the street shifting and cresting, lifting up into a narrow ridge, elevated above the crowd. Atop the ridge, Meran turned to them and calmly waited for them to follow.

  Talis and Dug left the guards behind, ascending the slope. It crumbled back to the ground behind them, and lifted to meet Meran’s feet as she walked confidently toward the docks. The crowd stumbled and fell as the ground moved, forcing them back.

  “How is this possible?” Dug asked Talis as they walked single-file behind Meran.

  Talis held up her hand for him to see the ring. “Looks like she’ll do what I want as long as I keep this on. Mostly. She gets a little creative with the ‘how.’”

  “And where did she come from?” His voice was tense. “What gives her such power?”

  Suddenly the ring felt too loose, and she closed her hand in a fist, squeezing until her fingernails cut into the palm of her hand. She increased her pace. She needed to be back on Wind Sabre. “It’s a long story, the telling of which deserves privacy and a stiff drink.”

  Chapter 32

  Cold air hissed through her teeth as Talis gently probed the purple flesh over her ribs with her index and middle finger. Meran perched on the counter along the med cabin’s bulkhead, watching her ministrations with the kind of interest that a cat would give a string in the wind.

  A deep-chested chuckle sounded from the door. Talis whipped her head around, against the protest of an ache that had developed in her shoulders and neck. Dug leaned his tall frame against the bulkhead, hunched so that his feathered topknot didn’t bump against the Cutter-height doorframe.

  He’d taken the account of their adventures in stride, from the conversation with Onaya Bone, to the Yu’Nyun simula and their crystalline engine, to Hankirk in the brig and Talis’s march into town with Meran. As far as he seemed to be concerned, the brand on Talis’s arm wiped away any question that she’d done the right thing. Except, maybe, leaving Hankirk alive.

  She narrowed her eyes at him, but then gave him a crooked smile to match his laugh before turning her focus back to her bruises. She didn’t cover herself. She’d spent too much time in crowded crew bunks with Dug to worry over what he might have left to see of her.

  “Any reason you haven’t had her heal that?” he asked.

  Talis looked up at Meran. She’d honestly not even ­considered it.

  Meran smiled at her. Closed-mouth, enigmatic. She answered, “I obey her will. Her concern was for her crew.”

  “That sounds like our captain,” Dug said. A look flashed across his face faster than Talis could interpret it.

  Meran had h
ealed Dug’s wounds—old and new—and had gotten them out of town without hurting anyone. Stark contrast to her violence on the Yu’Nyun ship, which she’d blown up without hesitation. Yet when they returned to Wind Sabre, she’d played healer to Scrimshaw. Placed a brilliant blue hand on xist chest, and xe’d returned to them.

  But the alien put a hand on hers before she took xist scar. Wanted to keep it, xe told her. Meran looked at xin a long moment, measuring xin silently, then accepted xist decision without a word and turned her attention to Tisker’s arm.

  The ring was in Talis’s pocket at the moment. A bulky, heavy weight that spun on her hand with the slack. It seemed safer off her finger. And the old metal made her skin itch.

  If Meran’s actions had all been a result of Talis using the ring, she might as well have done those things herself. The violence on one end, the healing on the other. She shook her head.

  “All right, then,” Talis said, re-rolling the bandages she’d been about to wrap back around her trunk. “So heal the broken rib already.”

  There was only a narrow space between the counter where Meran sat and Talis’s seat on the surgery table. The woman lifted one leg and put the ball of her bare foot against Talis’s knee. Talis felt a tingle spread through her body, like electricity and ice wrapped around each other and traveling through her bones. She hissed, surprised at a sharp pain in her side. Meran closed her eyes, and Talis felt something shift. The bone was knitting back together. In her mind’s eye she could see it happening.

  And then the pain was gone.

  The tingle chased upward to her arm. The brand flared with blue light.

  “And this?” Meran opened her eyes again and gave Talis a look that seemed to pierce through her.

  Dug shifted and stepped into the room. “Onaya Bone wanted you to have that.” He sounded almost desperate. Meran had left him with his older battle scars, which he’d proudly earned. But the way he spoke in favor of Talis’s new modification went beyond a preference for the look.

  Meran’s toes massaged Talis’s kneecap through her pant leg. “You may not always want such gifts as Onaya Bone has to offer.”

  “Leave it for now.” Talis pulled a long-sleeved gray shirt down over her head, marveling at the sensation of breathing and stretching without pain. The ache in her shoulders had also disappeared.

  Meran removed her foot. The tingle of cold lightning pulled back out again, as though the tendrils had been an extension of Meran herself, and she’d taken them with her. It left Talis feeling slightly hollow.

  “How strong is your power, exactly?” she asked Meran, as she lifted her hair so it pulled free of the collar of her shirt.

  The simula ran a finger along the blue lights of her opposite arm. “This piece of me has her limits. Whole, I would be ten times as strong.”

  “And the ring controls you completely? Whoever holds one can make you do anything?”

  “It is a battle of wills. I must resist where I can. My freedom is my destiny. Trapped for all this time, I can bear no more bindings. But I am segmented, and so the programming of this artificial body is stronger than my will. For now.” Meran’s neon blue eyes flashed. “Reconstituted, no mortal could bend my knee.”

  Dug was quicker on the math than Talis was. “There are four more rings, not nine. Wouldn’t you be five times stronger when we find them all?”

  Talis watched Meran’s face for the answer but wanted to shoot Dug a remonstrative look. Who said they were going after the other rings? They were on their way to Nexus. Meran and Onaya Bone would partner up and fight off the aliens, and Wind Sabre was going to retreat out of that picture and be glad of it.

  “The rings are the fractured pieces of my being,” Meran said. “My quintessence.”

  Her eyes slid from Dug to the lump in Talis’s pocket. “There are five other elements to collect before I will be fully restored.”

  Talis’s skin prickled. The anxiety she thought had finally released its grip on her returned. Meran’s phrasing could not have been coincidence.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am everything.” She slid off the counter and put her hands on Talis’s shoulders. “Or I was. When we reach Nexus, perhaps I will be again.”

  Meran smiled that cryptic smile of hers and left the room, lightly caressing Dug’s shoulder as she passed by him.

  Alone together, Talis and Dug exchanged a look. Talis took a deep breath.

  “Well, that sounded ominous.” She reached forward, opened a drawer under the counter, and plucked out the jar of Zeela’s healing ointment. She pulled up her right sleeve, then unscrewed the cap and held the jar in her right hand while she gently applied the herbal mixture to the brand. She felt the raised flesh beneath her fingertips, tracing the ridges as she gently massaged the ointment over Onaya Bone’s mark. The scent of rosemary and mint delighted her nostrils, and she exhaled a large breath.

  Dug crossed to the counter and leaned back against the spot across from Talis where Meran had been. He didn’t reply. She looked up at him with a raised eyebrow, but he didn’t appear to notice.

  “Scrimshaw settling in?”

  “Xe seems content,” Dug said absently. “Xe gave Sophie the tablet.”

  “Then she must be very content. Remind her we’re not done yet. I don’t want her taking that apart until this is over.”

  His jaw was slightly slack, and he seemed to be trying to capture a thought and turn it to words.

  “What’s on your mind, Dug?”

  He reached into the folds of his loose pants and pulled out a wooden locket, which he tossed to her.

  She knew what it was, but opened it anyway. The cover rotated on a pin near the clasp, revealing a shallow indentation carved in the bottom half. Within, a tiny etched portrait of a Bone woman looked fiercely back at Talis. She was strong-featured: high cheekbones, nose long and broad. Her lips were thin but not severe. Talis thought it captured Inda perfectly. Her heart caught in her throat. For her friend, now gone. For Dug, barely managing his pain after all these years.

  She looked up at him. His jaw was set and the muscles in his temples worked as he barely controlled his anger.

  “The Veritors killed my family, Talis. You know this.”

  Talis blinked rapidly. Closed her eyes, took careful breaths. Caged the flutter that threatened like the beast it was.

  She nodded to Dug, closed the locket and held it out to him. Forced a lopsided grin that must have looked as fake as it was and gave him a wink just to play out the farce. “Hankirk says they’re on their way to Nexus.”

  “Good,” he said, taking the locket back. He held it to his lips for a moment, then slid its twine cord over his head. It hung just below the notch at his throat. “Give him to me.”

  “Who, Hankirk?” Talis almost dropped the lid of the jar as she tried to replace it. She knew she’d have to deal with him sooner or later, but she’d been forcibly pushing the thought away. She screwed the lid on tight and tucked the jar back into its place, then busied herself cleaning up the scraps from the aborted dressing of her now-healed rib.

  Dug moved into her path when she started to carry the water bowl to the basin sink.

  “You aren’t going to kill him.” The storm was back in his eyes.

  “He could be useful,” she started. Then stopped. Dug didn’t care about that. But here and now, in the face of Dug’s intentions, she realized that Hankirk’s death was not something she could be responsible for. Not personally and not by association. She was weary from all the death that had already accumulated in the eddies off Wind Sabre’s stern. And now a ship full of aliens that she’d have to settle accounts for at the end of her run.

  “He’s one of them. A murderer.” His voice was barely a whisper.

  “He’s at least that, and planning more.” She shouldered past him and put the bowl down in the sink before t
urning back. Shoved her hand in her pocket, then tossed him the ring. He caught it reflexively.

  “How mad are you, exactly?” she asked him, shifting her weight to lean a hip on the counter. He didn’t answer, and she lifted her chin to indicate the ring. “You put that on, and Meran will kill anyone you want her to. Go get your revenge. She’ll make it glorious.”

  He rolled the ring between his fingers. It would fit him well. Better than it did her own slender digits.

  “That might be enough.” There was no humor in his voice. He handed it back to her. “But you have never led me wrong.”

  She laughed, and the lights of the med bay flared into stars through the liquid in her eyes. “Look where we are and tell me how I haven’t led you wild astray.”

  “Onaya Bone has chosen you. I chose you. The Mother of Sand would not have called you to her service if she did not have faith in your judgment. We can set things back in balance.”

  Onaya Bone hadn’t really allowed room for Talis to make any judgments. Bring her the ring. Fetch her a drink, she might have said. Talis was a lackey, that was all.

  But seeing that brand on her arm had shifted something in Dug. No questions left. He’d barely pressed the matter of Hankirk.

  “A brand on my arm can’t bring Silus Cutter back. Can’t bring your wife and son back.” She gestured uselessly with the ring in her hand. “Gods, I wish Illiya’s berserker drug hadn’t worn off, Dug, then I could hand you the heads of everyone who ever did you wrong.”

  Her own head could top that pile.

  “Talis,” he said, using her name to get her attention.

  His deep purple eyes searched hers, lower lids slightly squinted. He was fighting his own tears, she realized.

  He put his hands on her shoulders. “You will do what is right.”

  “Says one thief to another.” She was being flippant. Knew it wasn’t fair, but her thoughts were a coiling mess and they tightened around her heart. She took a deep breath, feeling the weight of his grip on her shoulders, and forced herself to soften her face. “I’m a mess, Dug. I don’t know what to do. I can’t tell what’s right in this.”