by eden Hudson
The sight of blood makes you woozy.
Penalty: -1 to Speed, -1 to Dexterity, -1 to Perception
Duration: Unknown
The world dimmed and fuzzed out. This was not going to be a fun task, trying to skin someone alive while reeling around as if she had a concussion.
Not daring to jump in this condition, Carina grabbed for the bamboo pole in front of her, Miyo’s hand missing at first, then connecting. The solid feel of the wood under her palm gave Carina something to focus Miyo’s attention on instead of the bloodstains. A little of the dimness and fuzziness faded.
Hooray, Miyo! You’ve unlocked Dual Minded (Level 1)! You can now think of other things while overwhelmed and regain 1% of your lost Perception and Dexterity per second! But if you try to move too quickly, your focus will shift back to the blood, and we all know what happens then, don’t we?
Carina ignored the prompt’s smarmy tone and wrapped her legs around the pole to slide down. Below, Unan had dismounted and was waiting for his daughter, holding the rope around the neck of a tall male captive.
After all of the falls she’d taken getting to this side of the village, Carina braced herself instinctively as she slid into the swamp water, but no warnings or all-capital prompts shouted at her this time.
The dark maroon water came to Miyo’s hip, plastering the short skirt to her body as if it had been painted on. Carina kept the eye-roll to herself in case the other tribe members misinterpreted it.
It was slow going wading through the water to Unan, but with every second that passed the regular colors faded back into the world and Miyo regained more balance.
“Daughter of my blood, favored child of the tribe,” Unan intoned as Carina approached, “we place the tithe in your Envishtu-blessed hands! May he look down upon your work and be pleased with his people!”
So not only was Miyo a flesher who couldn’t stand the sight of blood, but she was a Priestess of Envishtu. For a priestess to reject the tribe’s teaching wouldn’t just be abominable in the tribe’s eyes, it would be heresy. Here the superimposed base memory agreed with Carina’s memory: Just like the real-world skinner tribes, the fleshers burned heretics at the stake. They couldn’t be allowed to live because their blasphemy threatened to bring the wrath of the flesher god down on the whole of Tsunami Tsity.
Carina took the rope in Miyo’s shaking hand and was about to lead the slave to the flaying platform, which was still sparkling patiently off to the side.
But as soon as the rope changed hands, the slave started to thrash and fight. He was much larger and stronger than Miyo, and her Dexterity and Perception were far from 100%. It was all Carina could do to keep ahold of the rope.
Two raiders jumped into the fray, fighting to subdue the slave.
Oh no, Miyo! The slave won’t go quietly! He must be lulled with Envishtu’s Draught!
Objective: Retrieve Envishtu’s Draught from the apothecary table and feed it to the slave
Current objective failed in 29…28…27…
Carina dropped the rope and spun around, searching for the apothecary’s table while Miyo’s superimposed memories wondered where the apothecary was at a time like this. Usually the old woman administered Envishtu’s Draught.
There—covered in glass vials and colorful potions—that was her table. One of the bottles was glowing a brilliant aquamarine and pulsing with light. That was the one.
Carina lurched toward the table, but the attempt at speed knocked off all of the Dexterity and Perception she had regained while Dual Minding. It felt as if the muddy bottom of the swamp was sucking her down while the world tilted insanely from side to side. She fought through the dizziness, half stumbling, half swimming her way to the table while the timer counted down the seconds to failure.
Current objective failed in 16…15…14…
She grabbed the glowing potion bottle, careful to hold its neck in the circle made by her thumb and the lower half of her bladed index finger, then turned around and stumble-swam back to where the men were wrestling the slave. They held him down and pried open his jaws. The slave tried to bite. He spat words in a language that sounded like nonsense to Miyo, but she knew it was hatred. Carina recognized the look, too—snarling lips, eyebrows pulled down, neck muscles bulging—if the slave could break free, he would kill her.
The men pried open the slave’s jaws with the butt ends of their knives to keep their fingers from getting bitten off. One of the slave’s teeth cracked in the struggle.
Miyo’s heart raced. Frustrated, infuriated tears prickled at the backs of her eyes.
“We’ve got him,” one of the men yelled. “Go ahead, pour it in!”
Current objective failed in 7…6…5…
The world began to flash that panicked yellow, but all Miyo could feel was helpless rage. The tears threatened to spill over and brand her as a disgrace to her people.
Carina forced Miyo to focus on the potion bottle, Envishtu’s Draught, the bright color, the glowing—nothing but the glowing. But Miyo still felt as if she were coated in sick-smelling slime as she upended the potion into the slave’s mouth.
At first he choked and sputtered on the thick aquamarine liquid. A moment later, the slave’s pupils dilated and he relaxed. The men who’d been fighting him let go.
Great job, Miyo! You did it!
Reward: The overwhelming sense of accomplishment at a job well-done!
That almost broke Miyo. A hot tear ran down one cheek, but Carina swiped it away with the back of her wrist, making it look as if she was trying to clear her eyes of the water that had been splashed onto her face in the struggle.
“With strength like that he’ll make a good hand,” one raider said.
Another nodded. “Be able to sell his breeding rights, too.”
“I’ve got a female needs breeding,” a third offered. “Good strong stock if you’re interested in working out a price, Unan.”
“Tithe first, gentlemen,” Miyo’s father said, chuckling.
“That’s why Envishtu smiles at him, but never at you, you dolt,” a wife told her husband loudly. “Unan knows his priorities.”
“Bah, greatness for great men and a drink for me,” the husband scoffed to a round of laughter.
Miyo hated them all. Laughing, joking while they waited for her to strip the skin from another living man so they could work him to death while they wore his skin as a symbol of how wealthy they were, how superior to the Envishtu-cursed tribes.
No time to celebrate, Miyo! It’s time for everybody’s favorite ceremony!
Objective: Prepare the slave by hanging it from the flaying hook and begin quest Tithe of the Gods
The countdown timer gave Carina a full minute and a half this time, but the drugged slave went willingly. The tribe went on talking amongst themselves and preparing for the ceremony.
Miyo burned with hatred.
EIGHT:
Jubal
After we left Re Suli’s shack, I messaged the HeliCab pilots to let them know we were on our way, then started back toward Courten. I wanted to check on the ’Shan again, see what kind of progress they’d made, but the foliage was too malicious to walk and read at the same time.
“There anywhere to eat in town?” Nick asked, ducking under a low, moss-covered branch.
I slapped some vines aside. “Not unless you like raw nutsack and ass grease.”
“I need to get something on my stomach.”
“Got to eat before your muscles eat you alive,” I said, shooting him with a finger gun.
He shrugged one huge shoulder slab. “At least until they figure out an upgrade that slows metabolism when a knight goes without food for a certain number of hours.”
“Been thinking about engineering one?”
“The human genome’s above my paygrade,” he said. “I’ll stick to machines.”
“But having your fiancée just barely manage to keep herself alive in a prison pit while being systematically starved will make you think a
bout that sort of thing, won’t it?” I maneuvered around a dead-looking thorn bush. “She ate a bunch of rats, didn’t she? Caught them and ate them raw.”
Nick slapped at a late-season bloodsucker that had landed on his neck. “I don’t know about that.”
“She didn’t tell you? Carina said you guys talked about everything that happened while she was in Soam.”
“The important stuff,” he said.
I ducked under the low branch of an old oak. “But selling a piece of your soul because you thought she was dead didn’t rate a mention.”
Nick glared at a tangled curtain of vines as he swept them aside, but didn’t say anything.
“What’d you do?” I asked. “Gear the conversation toward her screwup, make that seem like the only important detail? If she didn’t ask, then it’s her own fault, right?”
Nick stomped his fat boot through a rotten deadfall that he could’ve easily stepped over. Dust, fungi, and wood chips scattered.
I kept the grin off my face and shook my head. “That doesn’t sound like somebody who deserves her to me. It sounds like a big, fat, lying hypocrite with bad breath and a tiny penis.”
Nick’s fists flexed. Barbwire tines dug into his wrist.
“And yet you act like you’re better for her than I am,” I said. “All I did was push her out of a helicopter. You’re deceiving her. I mean it was bad enough that you sold a piece of your soul to some demon-worshipping cult, but covering it all up? Going behind her back? Do you really think she’s going to forgive that?”
Underbrush crashed and vines snapped as Nick whirled around. He had me pinned against a tree, knuckle-raping my sternum before I could flinch.
“Shut your mouth, breaker,” Nick growled, close enough to my face that I could smell I’d been right about the halitosis. He ground his knuckles into my chest. “You don’t care about her—about any of this—so just shut your mouth.”
I gritted my teeth against the pain in my sternum. My mouth twisted into a grin. “All I can hear is you saying that I’m right.”
He cocked back a buckler-sized fist.
I giggled. “Careful, Nickie! When I get injured, I get chatty. There’s no telling what sort of details I might let slip to your fiancée about this little broventure we’re on. You don’t want to endanger the secrecy of this whole cover-up just because you get grumpy when you’re hungry.”
Nick scowled as if he wanted to rip my spine out and shove it up my ass, but slowly—very slowly—his fist came down.
“That’s using your brain cell,” I said. “We’re in this together now. We both know too much to go getting all violent. And FYI, if you’re thinking that nobody knows where I am and nobody but your fiancée would miss me if I disappeared, just remember that I’m the only one who knows where to find your vocor. Without me, you’re screwed.”
Nick shoved away from me with a low snarl. He turned and started stomping off toward Courten, tearing up the underbrush like a rooting hogzilla.
I straightened my tourist shirt before catching up to him.
“I think I’m a little hungry myself,” I said. “Of course, even if I had grown up poor mountain-bayou trash like you, there’s no way I would sink low enough to eat the stuff they try to pass off as food in this outhouse of a town. Additionally, if you don’t want Carina finding out the truth about you spurning her God again, we need to get this resolved before she gets done with Tsunami Tsity. We’ll skip the restaurant in town and eat at the airport.”
Nick didn’t look at me. “Where are we going?”
“To this little gem that just opened in the international terminal,” I said. “It got three Sarlean stars right out of the gate. You’ll love it.”
“Not for lunch,” he snarled. “I meant, where are we flying to from the airport?”
We stepped out of the jungle and into a clearing on the outskirts of Courten.
“I know that’s what you meant.” I gave Nick an extra-hard slap on the back. “I misunderstood you on purpose because I’m not telling you where we’re going. But we will find Marinette there. You can bet on it.”
***
In the HeliCab ride back to the airport, after I’d checked on the ’Shan and found its status listed as Pending, I did some research to confirm my hunch.
Gangs in Emden aren’t single-celled organisms; they have branches in most of the major cities and run their particular brand of chems, craft, and compulsion through each. Since the raid on the smoke bar last year, Forsaken activity and arrests had dropped off drastically in Taern, but tripled in the west coast city of Crystebon.
Crystebon was best known to most people as both Emden’s largest shipping hub and the one sacred harbor where the ocean-dwelling Cryst Riders would actually step off their vessels and walk around amongst the land-dwellers. And if you’re a little more worldly, Crystebon is also host to the most lucrative illegal sporting event in Emden—the dogfights. Based on some of the figures I’ve seen, the fights can pull down anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-six million a year in concessions alone. Which isn’t even counting admission, competitor buy-in, or the money that changes hands bribing the city’s Enforcers and betting on the fights.
Given the recent shift in Forsaken activity and the extroverted and violent preferences of Marinette that the Courten witch read in her little bone and ash trick, it seemed most likely that we would find Nickie’s vocor howling her lungs out ringside. My gut agreed. I don’t always trust numbers and bones, and I never trust witches, but I always trust my gut.
The next flight going to Crystebon wasn’t leaving until two thirty, so after I secured a pair of first-class seats, I made lunch reservations at the newly opened Be SoulFish. Under normal circumstances SoulFish didn’t take reservations the day of, but I sent along a sizeable funds transfer to the host to show that I was better than normal circumstances. Five minutes later, I received confirmation that our table was being held.
As soon as we arrived, the waiter seated us. According to him, the haiku of the day was the Sashimi of the Winter. Nick and I both ordered one, along with the three-star version of a Soami coffee for me and a bottle of plum-flavored mineral water for Nick.
The ’Shan’s status was still listed as Pending. I closed out of the Crotalinae app in disgust.
With nothing else to do while we waited for our food, I checked my countdown app. Seventy-six to one hundred and sixty-six days to cure my PCM. Urgency churned in my gut, but I calmed it down with a heavy dose of Soami coffee. The drink was too full of cream and sugar to be hot, but its warmth dampened the paperinas flitting around in my stomach.
I messaged the archeo-technomancer about the status of the crawler. He got back to me less than a minute later, claiming it was coming along nicely and should be ready to install in three days, as he’d originally estimated. Worst-case scenario, that would leave me seventy-three days to search the ancient texts for references to the Garden of Time, find its location, and steal all the time I could carry. Then, it would just be a matter of finding a cure for my PCM.
But what if I couldn’t find a cure?
I forced myself to take a deep breath and let it out slowly, then sipped at the sweet Soami coffee. I would find a cure. Of course I would. I was too beautiful, too brilliant to die. The world needed me. It was just a matter of finding out which spectacular and amazing way I would cheat death, once again proving that I was the best thief in the history of the Revived Earth.
“How’s the coffee?” Nick asked.
“As good as you’re going to get down here,” I said.
Even though the yellow tint was still clinging to my vision, I could see that Nick was studying me. I knew my smile wasn’t giving me away. I wondered how long it had been since I’d last said something. Must’ve been a good while to make someone as dimwitted as Nick take notice, let alone force him to make the first conversational move.
Nick was saved from having to strain his brain for a second move by the waiter reappearing to drop off o
ur Sashimis of the Winter.
I twirled each of my sticks around once, then used them to pop the first piece—a ginger bough that warmed my palate and signified the end of summer—into my mouth.
“Heard out of your fiancée yet?” I asked Nick when he looked up from his wristpiece.
Nick shook his head and picked up his sticks.
“She’s still playing.” Cultureless heathen that he was, Nick started eating at the bottom of his arrangement instead of the top. “I set up the console’s notifications to send me an alert when the end credits roll.”
A tingle ran up the back of my neck. “She’ll play straight through.”
It wasn’t a question—Carina wouldn’t leave something half-finished, especially not when she knew I was waiting on the other side—but Nick nodded as if I’d asked for his opinion.
I shook my shoulders out and plucked up a piece of smoked salmon the rusty brown color of autumn leaves. As I ate, the last gasps of fall gave way to the first snowfall of winter, signified by the delicate, chilled lilytail over flower petal rice that tasted like blanketing sadness and loss. Barren trees populated the foodscape in the form of frozen mint strips.
“Where do you think she’s at now?” I asked.
“Hard to say,” Nick said around a mouthful of food. He swallowed and checked his wristpiece. “She’s been in for forty-eight hours, maybe a little more. Took me a week and a half to play through the story mode. But I had to keep stopping for classes and training.” He glanced up at me, then back down at his food, trying not to let me see that this was yet another competition. “How long’d it take you?”
“Beginning to end, sixty-six hours straight.”
He tried not to look impressed. “You play over a holiday?”
“I was never in school,” I said. I’d just read and did what my father told me to when he told me to so I could spend the rest of my time reading and doing whatever I wanted. “When you’re a genius, it’s more practical to learn in the real world. Unlike some barbaric meatheads who don’t even know to eat their haiku from the top down to experience the sense of finality and closure.”
