Garden of Time

by eden Hudson

  Fine. I would do it. I would make our reality the right one. Nick was already out of the picture. We were halfway there.

  I rolled onto my back and spent some time digging through the most recent laptic backup of Nickie-boy’s wristpiece and accessing the Crystebon Enforcers’ files.

  EIGHT:

  Jubal

  I spent most of the next morning checking my SilverPlatter app obsessively, even though I knew better than to expect immediate action from the Guild. Those legalistic fanatics need quorum approval just to take a dump.

  Finally, in the early afternoon, the message I’d been waiting for arrived. It was from the Knight Superior to Carina.

  KS 14:40:12 Do you have any knowledge of Sir Beausoleil’s current whereabouts?

  After I sent the message through to Carina’s wristpiece, I finished savoring my grilled oysterlusk, then went off to see what she was up to.

  I found Carina on the bridge, listening intently to the captain as he described the Mirror Shard’s processes for breaking up varying thicknesses of ice through the Xhu Passage.

  I paused in the doorway, studying Carina’s face. Her posture and micro-expressions projected fascination and curiosity, but stroking ego-boners was one of her specialties. Under the smiles and questions, she could be feeling anything. Without checking the SilverPlatter again, I couldn’t tell whether she’d read and responded to the Knight Superior’s message yet.

  What I could tell was that this was becoming a pattern with her, running off and finding a safe older male she could wrap around her finger when things didn’t work out like she hoped with me.

  “And if that doesn’t break it up—which it won’t on floes more than a fathom deep—then we use the Hacksaw,” the captain said, gesturing at a knob on the panel, clearly hoping to interest her in a phallic equivalent. “She’ll let you know when she’s going. Yuh, she will let you know.”

  “That loud, huh?” Carina grinned at the old man.

  He chuckled. “And more so.”

  She followed that up with a question formulated to simultaneously puff him up and make him feel like he was teaching her something: “And you’re saying the Shard can keep pace even while she’s breaking ice?”

  “She holds the record for speed to ice thickness—four point six knots through floes of eleven feet and more. There’s not another icebreaker built yet what’ll match her.”

  I came up on the captain’s opposite side and leaned my hip against the control panel. “That’s not what the captain of the Ice Queen told me.”

  The old man’s head snapped around to glare at me. “If Chin’s been filling your head with nonsense, there’s nothing I can do but give you the facts—the Ice Queen’s fast, but she’ll never keep speed breaking anything over a fathom. She’s not built to keep up with a beauty like the Shard.”

  “Guess I’ll have to see it to believe it,” I said.

  Carina rolled her eyes at my antagonism.

  I gave her a twitch of the eyebrows. What’s the matter, can’t keep his ego-boner up when you’ve got an opposing force?

  She returned her attention to the captain. Challenge accepted.

  Oblivious to the conversation Carina and I were having, the old man said, “Likely you will see it. This time of year, the ice grows fast and thick.”

  “Maybe we’ll get to hear the Hacksaw in action,” Carina said.

  The old man chuckled again. “Doubt you’ll be so enthusiastic if we’ve got to turn her on in the middle of the night.”

  “Luckily, we’re only cruising as far as the Dispatch Station 11 on this tub,” I said.

  The captain’s expression fell from amusement to a combination of disappointment and suspicion. He looked from me to Carina, then back as if I were the one likely to betray something.

  “Can’t imagine what you two are after, going down to the pole during the worst weather of the season,” he said. “Couldn’t wait until spring when the megacells and thundersnows die off a bit?”

  “If we wait that long, all the good tardigrade eggs’ll have already hatched,” I said. “Can’t make a tardiomlette with tardicubs. Though I wouldn’t say no to a nice tender tardibrisket.”

  The corners of Carina’s lips twitched. She was fighting a smile.

  The captain cleared his throat, dismissing me as a waste of time, and went back to keeping watch out the bridge’s bank of windows. But the damage had been done. My infodrop had popped the charm of Carina’s hold over him.

  “Captain, how much do you know about the area south of the dispatch station?” Carina asked.

  “Not much to know,” he said without looking at her. “Uninhabited ice cap. Can’t support life of any kind—”

  “Except tardigrades,” I said, shooting him a finger gun.

  “—and there isn’t any life would want to live there if it could,” he finished.

  Carina nodded. “What’s below the ice cap?”

  “Same as any ice cap, I suppose. Land.”

  “First Earth ruins?” she asked.

  I restrained the cackle bubbling up the back of my throat. She was playing right into his suspicions.

  “Might be,” he said, looking sidelong at her. “You two looters?”

  “Might be,” she returned.

  The old man chewed on that for a while.

  “There’s nothing I can say as can convince you to keep off the ice cap if you think you’ve got a bead on something valuable,” he said. “I will tell you this, though—I’ve yet to hear tell of anyone who left the dispatch station coming back, not even in the mildest of spring weather. Take some time to think on that before we dock. Decide whether the loot you’re seeking out there in the ice really is that valuable after all.”

  I grinned. “How old are you, old man?”

  “You’re welcome to address me as ‘captain’ or ‘sir,’” he said, not looking away from the expanse of white outside the ship.

  “I’m guessing high eighties,” I said. “To a guy like you, what we’re after is pocket change. Me, I’m thirty-one, in the prime of what should be a very long, happy life full of women and money. If I don’t get what we came here after, my life’s going to be nasty, brutish, and short, and freezing to death in a thundersnow isn’t going to make one bit of difference.”

  “Yuh?” He sawed his jaw a bit, then nodded at Carina. “What about her?”

  I decided to play along. I looked Carina up and down.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  “It make any difference to you if she dies out there on the ice?”

  “Cut the salty seadog horror act, old man,” I said. “Neither one of us is going to die. She can take better care of herself than you can.”

  But Carina was gazing at the old man with what looked like genuine appreciation. She brushed her fingers across his elbow.

  “You don’t need to worry about me, Captain,” she said with just a touch of sadness.

  That was the blow that did it.

  The captain sniffed and twitched his mustache.

  “Worry is an old man’s right,” he told her. “I’ll exercise mine when I choose.”

  ***

  For her performance on the bridge, Carina scored us an invite to supper at the captain’s table. As soon as we made it back to the cabin, she started digging through her bag.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Dressing for dinner,” she said.

  “You’ve really got a thing for old men,” I said, hoisting myself up to sit on my bunk. “Saggy sack chaser?”

  She pulled some black pants that could pass for slacks and a deep purple shirt out of her bag. “I thought I was a snow fetishist.”

  “It’s probably just your daddy issues coming out,” I said. “Did you ever try to kill your mom and seduce your dad?”

  “No, that course of action never occurred to me,” Carina said, going into the head.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, I jumped down from the bunk and whipped of
f the tourist shirt I was wearing. A quick rifle through my luggage produced my most formal tourist shirt, the blood orange and jade.

  “Why?” Carina’s voice sounded canned and tinny coming through the door. “Did you ever fantasize about killing your dad and sleeping with one of his victims?”

  An image of my preteen self squishing around on top of a mangled, gore-covered body on the table in my father’s Guest Room forced its way into my brain. Bits of shredded skin, tacky with blood, clung to me as I thrust and blubbered and fought back the vomit filling my throat and the pants-shitting terror filling my brain.

  What’s the matter, Jubal, you don’t like her like this? my father asked, smiling his cold, eternal smile. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? DON’T YOU SHUT YOUR GODDAMN EYES, THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED. Did you think I didn’t see the way you looked at them? Did you think I didn’t know you were fantasizing about them? This is what they are. This is all they are. The sooner you get that into your fat head, the better. DON’T YOU DARE STOP MOVING, THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED.

  I giggled and shook the shiver out of my shoulders. That memory was supposed to be locked up tight enough that not even I could get to it. All of Carina’s limit-testing over the last few days must’ve knocked it loose. Clearly, I was going to have to design a better mental vault.

  “The old man and I never quite saw eye to eye on our ideal types,” I said a touch too loudly. Hopefully the door between us would keep Carina from catching the volume slip. “He liked torture, I like supermodels. What’re ya gonna do?”

  In the head, Carina made a sound that could’ve been an appreciative laugh or a noncommittal grunt. It was hard to tell without the visual cues.

  I put on the fresh tourist shirt, but my hands were shaking too severely to button it. This would be a good night to leave it open. Start a new trend in formal wear.

  Carina was still in there, so I pulled up my SilverPlatter app to get my head back on straight and checked to see how the plan was progressing.

  At some point before I’d joined her conversation with the captain, Carina had sent a carefully-worded reply to the Knight Superior saying she hadn’t spoken to Nickie-boy in almost a week. In response, the Knight Superior had sent her two messages.

  KS 14:58:01 Beausoleil started a report with the Enforcers in Crystebon five days ago following a raid on a local gang leader he helped corner, but he disappeared before finishing and filing it.

  KS 15:12:34 The contents of the partial report are very incriminating, Bloodslinger. If you’re in contact with him, you’ve got to let him know that confession and repentance are the only good options here. Running will only make this worse.

  I checked the time. The messages were four hours old. I couldn’t send them through to Carina with their current timestamps. Even with the on-again, off-again laptic connection on the icebreaker, a delivery this late would be suspect. I fixed the messages’ timestamps with my new CleanSlate add-on, then approved them for delivery.

  A second later, I heard her wristpiece’s notification, amplified and hollowed out by the acoustics in the head. With the SilverPlatter, I was able to watch her read and respond to them in real-time. It was word for word what I expected—

  CX 19:21:47 May I read the report?

  She didn’t come out immediately after she sent it. Maybe she’d still been half-naked when the notification went off. Maybe she was taking a very quiet crap.

  Or maybe she was composing herself.

  When she finally did come out, her hair was twisted into a knot at the back of her neck, with a few wisps hanging loose against the unblemished side of her face. Letting her acid scars glare at the world around her like a warning or a dare. You’ll be sorry if you try me, or Do your worst, I can take it.

  My mouth watered, and my fingers curled into fists at my sides.

  “What?” Carina asked.

  THIS IS WHAT YOU WANTED.

  I shuddered and giggled. I was about to say, “Took you long enough. What were you doing in there, rubbing one out?” but the PCM decided I didn’t get the dignity of a good comeback. A blast of jeweled flame ripped me away from the tiny cabin and into a spicy-sweet inferno where there was no past, no future, only cleansing fire.

  ***

  “It’s creepy,” Carina said. “The way you just stare off into nothingness when you’re having a fit. Can you hear anything while it’s happening?”

  We were walking together down one of the ship’s hallways, headed for the captain’s quarters.

  “Not a peep,” I said. “Feels great, though. If you can imagine getting a sensual massage inside a volcano, it’s along those lines.”

  A Carina-pause. Then, “It sounds painful, but nice.”

  “It is,” I said. “Why do you keep checking your wristpiece?”

  She didn’t miss a step, but her eyebrows drew together, and her lips tightened.

  “I’m waiting for something from the Guild,” she said.

  “Waiting for what?” I asked. “They can’t have you back right now. I have dibs. Laws of Knights Errant and whatnot. I’ll call in the War Angel if I have to.”

  We rounded a corner and found the flight of stairs that led up to the captain’s quarters.

  “It’s not about a mission,” Carina said, jogging up the steps. “They sent me a request for information, I answered them, and now I’m waiting for a response.”

  I followed behind her. “Information on what? That technomancy interrogation stuff you wouldn’t stop yakking about at the diner?”

  She looked over her shoulder and took a breath to answer me, but I cut in.

  “I’m just pulling your leg,” I said. “If it’s not directly related to me, I don’t care.”

  The unscarred corner of Carina’s lips turned up in a smirk. “That’s funny, considering you keep asking about Nick and me.”

  I pulled even with her on the landing. “That is directly related to me.”

  She stopped outside the captain’s quarters with her hand on the door latch. Those green daggers stared right into the twin dark chocolate universes of my eyes as if she were waiting for something.

  When I didn’t give her the easy way out, she played dumb. “Because you’re worried about my performance suffering on a mission you aren’t even paying me for?”

  I closed my hand over hers on the latch.

  “I’m not worried about that at all,” I said. “We both know your performance isn’t based on how you feel about Nickie-boy.”

  Before she could reply, I turned the latch and shoved the door open.

  “Welcome, welcome,” the captain said, standing to receive his beautiful guests. “Have a seat where you will. Guillermo’s just gone to fetch drinks. Would you take a bit of scal with an old man?”

  He was directing the question to Carina, not me, so I answered before she could.

  “I would rather eat a hollow glass dildo.” I took the seat next to the fair-haired first mate in her dress uniform. “Scal—like all alcohols—is a poison. It eats through your liver and your brain cells. But by all means, enjoy it while you’ve still got a few to lose.”

  Carina sat down on the captain’s left so he would have a perfect view of her unscarred cheek.

  “What year is it?” she asked him.

  “867, straight from the Xhu Islands,” the captain said. “One of the finest.”

  She turned a brilliant smile on him. “In that case, I would love a glass.”

  ***

  The captain spent the majority of our meal trying to impress Carina with feats of daring icebreaking he claimed to have accomplished in his younger days. That gave me the opportunity to emphasize my boredom by yawning loudly and checking my SilverPlatter app.

  Nothing yet. The Council probably had to take a vote before the Knight Superior could send Carina the report.

  Just as well. Carina couldn’t check her messages while she was pretending to be engrossed in the captain’s stories anyway.

  Across the table
, she laughed at something the old man said that wasn’t funny. He refilled her tumbler, then his, with scal. She lifted hers to her lips, but the level of alcohol didn’t drop enough to prove that she’d done more than pretend to take a drink to subliminally encourage the old blowhard to do the same. He did. I held back the knowing smirk and forced myself to look at something besides the way her lips shined with the poison.

  Beside me, the first mate’s smile had glazed over. I wasn’t the only one whose mind had checked out of the conversation.

  “Heard him tell this one enough times to know all the punch lines, huh?” I said, loudly enough that the captain would’ve heard me if he hadn’t been so occupied with Carina’s reactions to his lies.

  Red crept in around First Mate’s peaches-and-cream jawline.

  “I may have heard it once or twice,” she admitted. She tilted her empty glass and gazed into it longingly as if that would cause it to spontaneously refill.

  Her lips were wet and shiny with scal, too. I wondered what they tasted like.

  “Does any of this fishshit ever get him laid?” I asked.

  First Mate took a deep breath and let it out. “You’d be surprised.”

  Knowing what I do about picking up women, I would not.

  “At that age, I’m surprised that he can still get it up,” I said. “Does he give you a signal when he’s going in for the kill? A nod to let you know he and his unfortunate victim are ready for some privacy?”

  First Mate snorted behind her hand.

  “Think he’ll get mad if you and I get out of here?” I asked her. “He’s probably ready to make his move, and from the looks of it, she—” I jerked my head at Carina, who pretended not to see me. “—is raring to go. Tell him you’re taking me on a tour of this tub, and let’s make tracks before we see something we can’t unsee.”

  ***

  Scal—as I learned from the first mate’s mouth—tastes exactly the way it smells, like high-proof arson accelerant. It also stings when it comes into contact with the more sensitive areas of the body, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you like a little pain with your pleasure.