by eden Hudson
“Pull over.”
“Stop wetting your pants, Carina. We’re obviously fine.”
“Because I got us back on the right side of the road,” she said. “Pull over. We’re trading seats. Now.”
I didn’t. “It’s not like I’m going to glitch out again today. The fits are pretty regular—one every twenty-six hours or so.”
“And you’ve been driving this whole time anyway? You could’ve killed someone.”
“Oh, sure, now you care that I have the plague.”
I looked out both our windows, then checked the rearview to see how far we’d gone while I was out of it. Didn’t look like more than a few hundred yards. For a guy who hadn’t been able to see or hear, I’d done a pretty good job staying on the road. Turns out I’m even a good driver when I’m unconscious.
When I glanced Carina’s way again, the bore of her knuckgun was staring me in the face.
“Pull over,” she growled.
“Don’t you think it’s disturbing how often you resort to violence as a solution?” I said, calmly floating us to the side of the road. “Specifically with a knuckgun, sword, and throwing knife? Those things are more phallic than actual phalluses. It really says something about your innermost desires.”
Carina didn’t respond, just slipped her weapon back into her jacket. I put the Culebra in park, and we traded seats.
“You could also argue that it’s a sign of chronic spoiling,” I said, buckling the passenger side safety belt. “Mommy and Daddy taught Baby Carina that she could have anything she wanted if she took it at knuckgun point.”
She craned her neck to look over her shoulder as she steered us back onto the road. “Yeah, I’m the spoiled one.”
“Admitting you have a problem is the first step.” I stretched my arms over my head into the backseat and arched my back, grimacing at the crackling sound of my spine. We’d only been driving for a few hours. On the ’Shan, a certain level of soreness over long distances is expected, but the Culebra was built for comfort. I shouldn’t have been so stiff.
Maybe the PCM really was calcifying my joints. Just because nobody had proven yet that it was a symptom of the beautiful corpse’s progression didn’t mean it wasn’t. After all, nobody had disproven it yet, either.
I flexed my fingers into fists, then extended them, analyzing every motion of the joints as I did. Was it my imagination that they were grinding a little?
From the corner of my eye, I caught Carina watching me.
I opened up my library of ancient texts and got back to looking for the Garden of Time.
***
We tooled into the outskirts of the southernmost Crystal Lake settlement—Opal Lake—at eight on the dot, with the acid sleet trying to beat holes in the topcoat. Traffic was almost nonexistent up there, but because of the way the roads are laid out to wind around the topographical inconvenience of the shorelines, it was going to take us another hour to get from the southern tip of Opal Lake to the northern end of Amethyst Lake.
Carina glared out the window as she drove us through the streets lined with high-end shops, restaurants, resorts, and theaters. “So, this is the Crystal Lakes?”
The hostility in her tone would’ve gotten the attention of even a braindead gamma slug like her fiancé. To someone like me, it was as if Carina was shouting.
“What’s got your clit in a twist?” I asked.
“I grew up reading about knight candidates making pilgrimages here.” She turned her head to follow a flashing holoboard as we motored past. “Now that I’m actually here, looking at it… It’s just so commercialized. This place used to be sacred.”
“Every place used to be sacred to somebody, Carina. Usually because it’s got non-salt waterfront property.”
“What kind of person could look at something this beautiful and decide that they should build a bunch of businesses and houses on top of it?”
“The kind whose offspring can now afford to hemorrhage money every day for the rest of their lives without running low. You knew before we came up here that the Lakes were a popular vacation spot for the disgustingly rich. Did you seriously expect it to look like it did back in the Dark Ages? Did you think we’d run into some lone knight trudging wearily alongside his mangy steed? This place has abundant foliage and clean, colorful water. Obviously people are going to build here. You might as well be throwing a fit that civilization didn’t die off when the First Earth ended.”
That brought on a Carina-pause.
I waited her out, only breaking in once to point out our exit.
Her voice was softer when she spoke up again. “When I woke up this morning, I thought I had dreamed yesterday. That none of it was real. Meeting you and Iceni at the diner, getting in the car with you, falling asleep inside a mountain…”
Nick’s disappearance from the face of the Revived Earth, I didn’t say.
“…none of it felt real,” she said. “But seeing the Lakes like this proves that I’m not dreaming. I guess I’m just disappointed that I had to wake up.”
I shifted from one side of my butt to the other.
Back when I first met Carina, I would’ve assumed her whole spiel was a lie concocted to draw something out of me. I don’t believe in dreams. I’ve never had one nor met anyone who could prove that they’d had one. But it wasn’t that long ago—or it didn’t feel like that long ago—that she had asked me in that perfect, earnest way if I didn’t have a hard enough time telling reality from fantasy.
Maybe Carina really did believe she had dreams. Maybe every morning, in the split second between awake and asleep, she cooked up elaborate delusions around a thought or idea or ruggedly handsome thief and convinced herself that she’d experienced them while asleep.
Or maybe this was some sort of game she was playing. She couldn’t know that I didn’t believe in dreams, could she? Unless she didn’t believe in them either, and she wanted me to admit that I didn’t first.
“There you go with that romantic nonsense again, Bloodslinger,” I said. “Prettying up the dirty decisions you made so Nickie-boy can’t blame you for running off without him.”
She shrugged, which meant she disagreed but didn’t think she needed to argue with me about it.
“All right, then, sister, how often do you claim to dream?” I asked her.
One dark brow rose. “Claim to dream? I dream a few times a week. That I can remember, that is. Why do you want to know?”
“What are these alleged dreams about?”
Carina was studying me now, those sharp green daggers sliding over my face, poking and prying.
“Watch the road,” I snapped.
“I dream about lots of things,” she said. “Why?”
“Tell me about the last one you had.”
“Van Zandt.” She enunciated my name carefully as if I wouldn’t be able to hear her otherwise. “Why do you want to know?”
“Can you prove that you’ve had these dreams?”
I expected her to claim that her memories of them meant they had happened, but she didn’t.
“Of course not,” she said. “They’re dreams, not alibis.”
“But you claim to have them.”
A ghost of a smile touched the corners of her lips. “You claim to have a number of skills I can’t possibly observe, quantify, or prove. Does that mean they’re not real?”
“Don’t get all defensive just because I don’t believe your bologna about dreaming,” I said. “You’re the one who brought it up; therefore, the burden of proof is on you.”
Carina let out a short, sharp laugh. “Proof of what? That I sometimes dream?”
“That you’ve ever dreamed at all.”
Time stretched out.
“You’re serious,” she said.
“Look, if you can’t prove it, that’s fine,” I said. “We’ll chalk this one up to Fibs Carina Tells and move on.”
She cocked her head. “Why do you want me to prove it?”
“Well, for
starters, if you dream about me a lot, then it would make sense that you thought yesterday was a dream.”
“But if I say I dream about you a lot, how can you believe me? You don’t even believe that I dream. You couldn’t take my word for it.”
“So, you’re saying you dream about me all the time. Do these dreams make Nickie-boy jealous? Are they sexy? No, let me rephrase that—how sexy are they on a scale of one to real-life Jubal?”
“You’re changing the subject,” she said, turning her body to face me. “What would it mean to you if I could prove that I had dreams? And why don’t you believe that I do?”
“Watch the road,” I repeated. “Now who’s avoiding the question? Additionally, how am I supposed to believe something like that? Name one person who could prove that they really dreamed.”
I expected her to cite the sick and twisted bedtime stories that her mother, Sir Siobhan, claimed came from her nightmares, but Carina just asked,
“Jubal, can you not remember ever having had a dream?”
She’d done that on purpose, using my first name to draw me closer, to make me want to open up to her.
I laughed. “I see what this is about. You’re trying to distract from the fact that you didn’t ask Nickie to run away with us because you were hoping something romantic would happen. Like in these erotic fantasies you’re claiming are dreams.”
“I’ve never hoped that something romantic would happen between us,” she lied.
“Then why didn’t you invite your fiancé?”
She hesitated. “Nick and I aren’t talking right now.”
It took every ounce of willpower I had not to cackle at that flagrant manipulation of the truth. She didn’t want me to know that she couldn’t find him. Maybe because it hurt too much that he’d disappeared without a word. Or maybe because it hadn’t hurt enough.
“Finally got tired of his fishshit, huh?” I said. “Well, you lasted a lot longer than I would’ve. Of course, we’ve already established that he was probably pretty well-hung, so nobody can blame you for trying to stick it out.”
“I’m not doing this with you right now, Van Zandt.”
Attagirl. Retreat into my last name. Try to put some mental distance between us.
“Because you don’t want me picking at a wound that’s been festering since you met me,” I told her.
Carina rolled her eyes. “Sure, that’s why.”
But for once, her sarcasm sounded forced.
***
As we wound our way between the Onyx and Carnelian lakes, the businesses and the holoboards became scarce, and the waterfront estates took over. The road was bordered on each side by textured rockcrete walls or composite fences painted to look like real wood weathered by time and the elements. Manicured forests and privacy parks conspired with the darkness to hide most of the houses from passing vehicles, but we caught sight of the occasional array of party torches and bug lanterns through the trees.
Finally, we passed a sign declaring the Amethyst Lake township. Carina followed my directions onto the smaller two-lane that shadowed the contours of the lakefront. The trees closed in overhead, as thick and dark as the heart of the Soami jungle, but coniferous.
Carina’s posture relaxed the farther into the wilderness we drove.
“This part isn’t so bad,” she said when she saw that I saw her mood changing.
“Not so bad.” I shook my head. “Carina, this is the most exclusive spot in the Lakes. People literally murder to get property here.”
“Did you?” she asked without glancing over at me.
“Don’t be stupid. My place was a gift from the Mimic itself. I helped it out with a little work, and it was so thankful that it threw in the lake house as a bonus.”
Carina’s smirk butted up against her scars, but she didn’t say anything.
“What?” I said.
“I was just thinking that only one of the Four would be a powerful enough client that you couldn’t get them killed or imprisoned.”
“Finally done pouting, Bloodslinger? Well, you’re just in time.” As the Culebra rolled over a hill, I pointed out the windscreen at a hidden drive. “Turn here and feast your hyperfocus upgrades on this.”
She turned. A second later, the trees pulled back and my lake house appeared. At ground-level, a sapphire-blue heated pool flowed under the exterior wall and out into a manicured rock garden. On the second story, a wraparound screened-in balcony looked out over the lake and a private dock.
Carina pulled into the parking spot, eyebrows raised. She was impressed.
“That’s what I thought,” I said, popping open my door. “And you haven’t even seen the inside yet.”
My wristpiece unlocked the house as we approached the front door. It felt strange to walk in without tossing my bags onto the counter—I’d never been up here on the spur of the moment with no luggage—but I pictured myself unshouldering the usual heap, and the weird sensation that I was forgetting something went away.
Carina shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and looked from the rustic kitchen and dining set to the living room’s overstuffed couches and chairs.
“There are three bedrooms upstairs,” I said. “The one off the balcony is mine. You can take your pick of the other two. I think the cleaning service keeps the sheets and blankets in the room closets.”
She shot me a half-smirk. “You don’t know?”
“What would I do in the other bedrooms? The good bed is in the balcony room.”
“Somehow I can’t picture you bringing women back to the same bed you’re going to sleep in.”
I cackled. “I wouldn’t bring some slut from a bar back here at all.”
“I was under the impression you couldn’t sleep alone,” she said in a tone that insisted a little too strongly that the comment was nothing more than a friendly poke with a stick.
“So jealous,” I said. “Trust me, Carina, the last thing I do with my bedpartners is sleep.”
She shook her head and swept her long hair away from her cheek, exposing her shiny pink acid scars.
I grinned at the reemergence of that tic. Carina could deny that she wanted me to her last breath, but her body language always gave her away.
“Pool’s through there, bathroom’s over there, there’s another bathroom upstairs off my bedroom—you’re welcome to use it whenever your shy bladder permits. Now, I didn’t let the service know I was coming, so the kitchen’s not stocked. That brings us to the most important question of the night: What do we order in?”
Carina considered the question.
“I’d really like a beer,” she said. “But I don’t want to go out. Are there any restaurants that deliver beer with their food?”
“If you shell out enough money, every restaurant will deliver beer with your food.”
***
Half an hour and one eliminated ancient text from my Garden of Time search later, a knock at the door announced a skinny delivery creep struggling to balance a hotbox full of our artisan black pepper and bacon pizza and a six-pack of Skull Cap, which his manager had assured me when I ordered was the Crystal Lake’s finest microbrew. Carina gave the creep an exorbitant tip just because it was sleeting. I slammed the door in his face so he would know not to expect lightning to strike twice in the same spot.
Carina set the food on the table and pulled out a chair.
“We’re not eating down here,” I said, grabbing the box and heading for the stairs.
“You can see why I might make that mistake, though,” Carina said as she followed me up to the second floor. “Thinking we were going to dine at a dining table?”
“Yeah, for a person who’s got no imagination at all, I can see how that would be the easiest possible conclusion to jump to.”
Upstairs, I led us through my bedroom and out the sliding door onto the balcony. I hit the switch on the fire pit as I passed. Its Infinity Coalbed flared to life and began battling back the chill of early winter.
W
e both pulled a lawn chair close to the fire and settled in to eat. Now and then lightning near the center of the lake illuminated the amethyst water, and thunder rumbled an answer.
“Want a beer?” Carina asked me after her second.
I wrinkled my nose. “Gross.”
“I didn’t think so, but I felt bad not offering.”
“You haven’t drank around me since Nytundi,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d finally convinced you that alcohol was the drink of the lazy and the weak.”
“Are we not even allowed to be lazy and weak on vacation?”
I swallowed the bite of pizza I’d taken and said, “The Bloodslinger would never admit to being weak unless she’s playing a part, and we both know there’s no reason to pretend to be something you’re not with me.”
The beer bottle Carina was lifting hesitated for a nanosecond, then continued its trajectory to her lips.
When she lowered it again, she said, “Because you’ll see through that act.”
“Like a glass-skinned gecko, sister.”
A Carina-pause followed. I almost didn’t catch it because I hadn’t said anything that required her to respond, but the glow from the fire pit illuminated her face just enough for me to see that she was thinking through something.
I savored the burn of the black peppers and salt of the bacon while I waited. My flame kigao floated just above the flames of the fire pit, so I had a pretty good idea where Carina was about to turn this conversation.
“In the diner,” she finally said, “you stopped talking to me, didn’t you? You were talking to her.”
Electricity jolted through my gut. I was positive that Carina was indicating my kigao with her eyes, positive she could see her, too. For a split second, I believed that playing Tsunami Tsity had unlocked the kigao for her, too.
But then Carina went on, “The one who warned you about the hijacker and everything else.”
The shock died away. It had just been a coincidence, a lining up of my perspective and the direction Carina was facing.
“She was trying to warn me about the guy that came in after you,” I said. “He was a PI.”
