by eden Hudson
Contents
Summary
You love it like this.
ONE: Jubal
TWO: Nick
THREE: Jubal
FOUR: Nick
FIVE: Jubal
SIX: Nick
SEVEN: Jubal
EIGHT: Jubal
NINE: Nick
TEN: Jubal
ELEVEN: Nick
TWELVE: Jubal
THIRTEEN: Nick
FOURTEEN: Jubal
FIFTEEN: Jubal
SIXTEEN: Nick
SEVENTEEN: Jubal
EIGHTEEN: Nick
NINETEEN: Jubal
TWENTY: Nick
TWENTY-ONE: Jubal
TWENTY-TWO: Jubal
TWENTY-THREE: Jubal
TWENTY-FOUR: Jubal
TWENTY-FIVE: Nick
TWENTY-SIX: Jubal
TWENTY-SEVEN: Nick
TWENTY-EIGHT: Jubal
Books, Mailing List, and Reviews
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Works by eden Hudson
Books from Shadow Alley Press
Copyright
Summary
Deadly glacial caves, murderous speleothems, and blazing flame spirits.
Jubal Van Zandt is running out of time to find a cure for the plague. His only hope is the Garden of Time, where actual, physical time is grown and stored. Anything that can be stored can be stolen. For the greatest thief in the history of the Revived Earth to get his hands on a supply of extra time, he and Carina will have to fight their way across a treacherous ice cap, through an endless blizzard, and into a cave full of homicidal rock formations.
But the biggest threat to their dynamic duo isn’t the immortal guardian waiting to destroy anyone who tries to make off with the Garden’s treasure. This time the greatest danger is a lot closer than Jubal wants to admit.
You love it like this.
ONE:
Jubal
I sat in the diner, jiggling my legs under the table and shifting back and forth a little in my seat. Carina had agreed to meet more than an hour ago. It had taken me forty-five minutes to drive over in the Culebra, and I’d been checking the time on my wristpiece ever since. She shouldn’t be much longer, even if traffic had suddenly picked up since I got there—which it hadn’t. Even in a city the size of Taern, traffic is thin at three in the morning.
The door opened, momentarily turning up the volume on the downpour outside. Instead of the Bloodslinger I was waiting for, the last candy knight in the Revived Earth I wanted to see walked in.
Ariadne Iceni’s blue eyes zeroed in on me immediately, and her face split into a triumphant grin, cutting dimples into her flawless cheeks.
I threw up my hands and flopped back in my seat, sighing loud enough for the candy knight to hear my disgust across the room.
Iceni’s dimples cut deeper, and she sauntered over.
“Good to see you, too.” She gestured at Carina’s empty seat. Her fingernails sparkled with blue glitter a shade lighter than her eyes. “May I?”
“This is stalking,” I said.
She sat down anyway. “Not if I was in the neighborhood. Then it’s a coincidence.”
“If you were in the neighborhood because you’ve been tracking my wristpiece’s location history, it’s stalking.”
“What if the word on the street was this is your favorite restaurant in town and I decided to try it out for myself?”
“Then somebody lied to you.” I held up my bottled water. “Do you see this? It was bottled this year. It tastes like someone juiced one of those birth-defect babies of the aught-five Plastic Debacle and slapped a label on what dribbled out. Favorite restaurant, my foot.”
Iceni’s blue eyes twinkled. “That’s not what the PI’s report that I just read says.”
“You mean the report that you just made up to get my attention?”
“No.” She messed with her wristpiece for a second. Mine beeped a notification, and she nodded at it. “That report. Public investigator from the South Bank filed it with the Enforcers a few hours ago.”
I didn’t open the message. “How much did he set you back?”
“I’m the best investigator on the force,” she said, pressing her palm to her chest in just the right spot to draw my attention to her graceful cocoa powder throat. “I don’t need to pay a snoop to do my job for me, cutie. If it was me on your tail, I would’ve been sitting where you are right now when you walked in, with a steaming plate of biscuits and gravy waiting for you.”
That wasn’t an impressive guess. If the report was legit, my preferred breakfast could’ve been in there for anybody to read. Or she could’ve heard from anybody who patronized this dive that the only palatable food they serve is biscuits and gravy. She could even have seen from the corner of her hyper-focused eyes that the line cook had just put a double order—mine—and a single order for Carina to defile with red pepper flakes, in the window, and estimated based on how much of my bottled water was gone that I’d been here long enough for that order to be coming my way. I tend to be the only person I deal with on a regular basis who can consistently make connections like that, but she could’ve had a rare moment of brilliance.
“But you showed up after me and brought a steaming pile of fishshit about PI reports instead,” I said. “Forgive me if I’m not shaking in my custom-made sneaks.”
Iceni dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “I just came here to warn you. Someone’s looking for you. I can’t say for sure whether it was that Soami jungle baron who put out the ILO on you last week because PIs aren’t required to file their clients’ names, but my gut says it’s a safe bet.”
I leaned back in my chair, tipping it up onto two legs. “This is the most desperate pickup attempt I’ve ever seen. I mean, I get why you’re so obsessed with me. Who wouldn’t be? But going to all this trouble? It’s pathetic.”
A sickeningly sweet laugh bubbled out of the candy knight’s throat, and she clasped her delicate hands in front of those half-cup-of-sugar breasts.
“As if I don’t have boys lined up around the block,” she gushed. “Saner and prettier ones, too.”
I put a hand on the table to steady my chair. “Obviously that’s a lie. There isn’t anybody prettier than me.”
“Well, saner ones, anyway.” She gave me a sugary wink. Then she rapped her knuckles on the table twice as if to change my focus or announce that she was about to leave. “Take the warning or don’t take it, cutie. I honestly don’t care enough to argue with you. You’re fun in the sack, but you’re not worth the headache, you know?”
“Oh please, we both know I’m worth every headache,” I said. “That’s why you’re here at three in the morning pretending not to stalk me.”
The diner door opened and shut again, this time admitting the knight I’d been waiting for. Carina saw me sitting with Iceni and asked with a micro-twitch of one dark brow whether she should come over or wait.
Before I could answer, Iceni twisted around in her seat to see who I was paying more attention to than her.
“Bloodslinger!” She waved Carina over. “I was just keeping your seat warm.”
As Carina crossed the floor toward us, I realized she was favoring her left leg a little more heavily than I remembered. I wondered whether she was putting on an act for Iceni’s sake or the weather was bothering it.
“Don’t get up,” Carina said. “I’ll pull up another chair.”
Iceni shook her head and stood. “No, it’s all right. I can’t stay. I wish I could, but I’m on the clock. We’re short-staffed this week, so naturally every criminal on the street is tripling their efforts.”
“I heard the Scythes put out a bounty for severed heads of Enforcers on t
he gang task force,” Carina said.
“Say, that’s something you could be doing instead of stalking me,” I told Iceni, shooting her with a finger gun. “Try getting reassigned to the gang task force.”
The candy knight made an exaggerated pouty face. “But I don’t want to stalk gangsters, I want to stalk you.”
“I’m taking that as a confession, candy stripe.”
Iceni grinned, dimples appearing in her cheeks again. “You take that any way your paranoid little heart desires.” She wiggled her blue-frosted fingers goodbye. “You two have fun, now. Toodle-loo!”
“Watch your back out there,” Carina said.
Without looking back, Iceni snapped her fingers and called over her shoulder, “I always do.”
Carina watched the candy knight saunter away, probably thinking it was a miracle Iceni didn’t make a sticky sound every time she picked one of her dainty feet up off the diner’s dirty floor.
I knew Iceni would check the reflection in the diner’s door to make sure I was watching the perfect sway of her ass, so I pretended to play a game on my wristpiece. In reality, I opened the report she’d sent me.
It looked like an authentic public investigator’s report, complete with a list of my known aliases, haunts—this diner being one—a nearly passable description of the ’Shan but with no mention of it having been wrecked, and a few suspected residences around Taern. One address—a luxury garden apartment less than a block from my riverfront loft—was disturbingly close to home.
Here was proof that I had been spending way too much time in Taern lately. Under normal circumstances, I rotate at random through my various residences around Emden, supplementing copiously with trips abroad and penthouse stays at my favorite five-star hotels. But since my diagnosis, I’d become more focused on finding a cure for the plague than staying one step ahead of anybody who might be looking for me. I needed to get out of town.
The downpour outside spoke up for a second, then muted itself again as the door swung shut. The candy knight was gone. I closed the report and looked up at Carina.
With a grimace, she lowered herself into the seat across from me. “Pre-biscuits and gravy meeting?”
I grinned. “You’re almost cute when you’re jealous, Bloodslinger, you know that?”
Carina didn’t take a return swipe at me, which wasn’t how our interactions were supposed to go. I sat forward, leaning my arms on the table.
“Something’s wrong,” I said, drawing my brows down as if I didn’t already know what.
Her startled green eyes met mine for a split second, and I wondered if somehow she could know that I knew. But then they softened to a color like emeralds wrapped in velvet. My noticing her mood and asking about it had touched her.
Before she could respond, I slapped the table.
“Wait! I know what it is.” I pointed at her. “Regional Affective Disorder. You’re sick and tired of this godawful city.”
The unscarred corner of her lips twitched upward. “I’m pretty sure you just made that up.”
“There’s no shame in it,” I said, ignoring her. “I get RAD poisoning sometimes, too, and there’s only one cure. We need a vacation.”
“I just got off a month-long mandatory rest and recuperation.”
“Yeah, but where did you spend it? You split the time between here and your wet country house. The cure for RAD poisoning isn’t saturating yourself in the place that’s bringing you down, Carina, it’s running away. We’re going up the country for a couple days. Pack a bag if you want, but it’s more effective if you go on the spur of the moment with nothing but the clothes on your back.”
“I can’t go anywhere right now, Van Zandt,” she said. “The Guild just passed a motion to bring in technomancers for questioning on the Tect situation, and there hasn’t been a sighting or sign of Tect activity on either front in more than a week. If they’re gearing up for a big push into Emden, we’re going to need every possible knight on the frontlines.”
All of that, but not a single word about her meathead fiancé’s disappearance. I grinned.
“So, what you’re saying is nobody needs you yet?”
Carina swiped the hair away from her face, exposing the shiny pink acid scars on her cheek.
“I’m saying I’m tired. The leg I broke hurts. The vertebrae I had to have rebuilt hurt. Every place I’ve ever been injured hurts. I’m older than I thought, and there’s still so much to do.” She sighed, then shook her head. “Your game made me tired.”
I studied her lips and the pools of shadow under her eyes. “Because you loved it.”
“Tsunami Tsity was a fascinating study in the shortsighted psychology of teenagers who want to change the world,” she said because it could never be as easy as ask a question, get an answer with her.
“Thanks for the objective report, Bloodslinger, I’ll be sure to file it with the appropriate—” I slammed my face down on the table, snoring.
“All right,” she said. “That’s enough. Everyone in the room is looking at and paying attention to you; you can get up now.”
I sat up and scooted to the edge of my seat, leaning on my elbows. “Tell me the good stuff! I know what happened in the game. I want to know about your experience of it. What was it like? What did it make you feel? Where did it hurt the most?”
She closed her eyes.
“It made me remember when I was like them,” she said, her voice soft and cut with a combination of sadness and longing. “When I was so passionate about doing the right thing that I never thought about collateral damage.”
My heart sped up, pounding like thunder from a megacell inside my chest.
“When she came back for you—” My eyes watered from the excitement pushing at the back of my throat. “—was it the most beautiful thing you’d ever seen?”
Carina pressed her lips together. After a second, she nodded.
I exhaled and fell back in my seat. I could picture Carina in the Tsunami Tsity mud, sobbing, broken. Then Yisu’s flaming hand reaching down to pull her up, letting her know it wasn’t over, letting her know this world wasn’t good enough for creatures like them. A shiver raced up my spine. I shook my shoulders out.
“How long did it take to get Yisu to trust you?” I asked. “I was in with her in, like, two days game-time.”
“Longer,” Carina said, her green eyes losing focus as she thought back. “Maybe twenty-four hours from the first time I confronted her, but I didn’t talk to her one-on-one until just before the first sabotaged raid. That would’ve been, what, a week?”
“You took your time watching her and blending in, then you slipped past her defenses when she least expected it.” I knew that was how she would play it, employing her I’m like you and we are in agreement approach, twisting Yisu into trusting her.
The left corner of Carina’s smile butted up against her scars. “You walked up to her right after the first Tithe of the Gods and blurted out everything, didn’t you?”
I cackled. “Hey, sister, not many people can pull that off. It’s just one of the countless traits that make me a winner. Also, the first player to finish Tsunami Tsity in less than three days’ real-world time.”
“Is that a verifiable fact or something you made up?” she asked, raising one dark eyebrow at me, but still smiling.
“That’s gospel. The best recorded Story Mode time according to Psych Tryke’s Gamer Reputation Station was ninety-eight hours eleven minutes. I made it through in sixty-nine hours flat.”
“That’s impressive enough to make me wonder why you didn’t brag about it the first time you, Nick, and Iceni talked about Tsunami Tsity.”
“Duh, because you hadn’t played. You couldn’t know why my time was impressive yet, and I wasn’t going to waste the shock value on those retards.”
Her eyes glinted glacial swamp ice at my choice of epithet.
I rolled my eyes. “Goons. Meatheads. Guild knights whose level of mental acuity lies well below the range of
ours and who wouldn’t appreciate the magnitude of my accomplishment. But I knew you would get it—” I made a fist under the table to keep from grabbing her hand. “—all of it. That’s why I wanted you to play.”
“That’s not the only reason,” Carina said. “After we left the ruins of that sunken city, you said if I played, you would tell me how you knew we were about to be attacked on the plane.”
“The electricity is about to go out.” My flame kigao floated next to the table, a perfect rendering of a pubescent human female made entirely of roiling fire and burning impurities. Her wide burning-blood eyes screamed at me, desperate to shut me up.
I shot her a look that very clearly told her to butt out until there was a real emergency. I didn’t need her trying to control what I chose to reveal to whom.
“In the skinner village, too,” I told Carina. “And when that eelfucker from Soam was going to execute us. She even told me trouble was coming right before I had to cut your line and drop you back into the jungle.”
Carina’s head cocked. “She? She who?”
“Oh, come on, Carina! You played Tsunami Tsity. Don’t tell me you haven’t already figured—”
My kigao put both fiery hands on the table and leaned down into my face. “The electricity! Is about! To go out!”
At the same time, the diner’s door opened, letting in a stiff damp breeze and a man. He took off his dripping hat, glancing at me, trying not to be obvious as he did it, then splattered himself into a window seat facing away from Carina and me. He took the menu card out of its holder as if to read it, but he looked at the glass, watching me in its reflection.
The short hairs on the back of my neck prickled. Iceni’s public investigator?
My flame kigao disappeared, as if to say Duh.
“Don’t take that tone with me, sister,” I grumbled. “If you’d expand your damn vocabulary, I wouldn’t have to play Guess the Threat every time.”
“What tone?” Carina interrupted. “All I said was…”
I tuned her out. We needed to make an exit. Discreetly. As if we hadn’t even noticed the guy.
