by Lauren Esker
She plotted her course carefully. There was a slight depression above the sphinx's cheek, a carven version of the concavity behind a human's eye socket. It would give her some purchase to get to the edge of the eye. From there she could boulder up the side of the eye-window, climb onto the brow, and cross a short expanse of forehead to pull herself up onto the balcony.
Perfectly doable, she thought, as long as she didn't dwell on the consequences of failure, which would be a great deal worse than bruising herself on a mat.
This was her last chance to easily turn back. She glanced down the back of the ear. She could retrace her climb, retrieve her shoes, and try again from inside the sphinx. Once she crawled out on the cheek, going back would be as difficult as going forward, and if her strength failed her, if she got too cold or tired to go on, she'd be trapped.
Her toes were already starting to go numb standing here. She had to get moving. Up or down.
She found a handhold and a foothold, and crawled out onto the sphinx's cheek.
It wasn't so bad once she committed herself. There was no space in her brain for anything other than planning her next move. Each new handhold and foothold had to be carefully calculated; she always kept three points in contact with the rock (hand, hand, foot; foot, foot, hand) and didn't dare let go until she knew where she was placing her next grip. The wind tore at her, but she told herself she'd had worse the last time she went rock climbing in Colorado.
Foot, hand, foot, hand ... The unaccustomed weight and constriction of the jacket tugged at her in strange ways, trying to pull her off balance, but she adjusted as she got used to it.
She had to let her emotions go, settling into a meditative calm. When one of her hands slipped and she dangled, for a moment, in danger of losing her other grip, she found herself looking more than a hundred feet down to the churning water and feeling nothing at all. That would have hurt, she thought calmly, planting her free hand on the rock and digging in her fingers.
The growing ache of bruised fingers and toes, the cold wind raising gooseflesh across her sweat-damp neck, the painful lash of hair slipping free of her ponytail and stinging her eyes—all of it was accepted, processed, and let go. She was ice on a still pond, she was the wind that flowed across the ship and the water around it ... she was fully in her body while also watching herself from the outside. There was nothing but the climb.
She reached the window recessed into the sphinx's eye socket. It was even bigger than it looked from a distance, at least twice her standing height and fifteen or twenty feet across. The smoked glass reflected more light than it let through, so she couldn't see what was inside, though she got an impression of depth and space.
If I were a rich asshole living inside a sphinx head, I wouldn't skimp on the luxuries, after all.
With her toes clinging to the sphinx's eye socket, she held on with one hand at a time while shaking out the other one. Her wrists had begun to ache fiercely, and the muscles in her arms and shoulders quivered and jumped with fatigue. If she'd planned to climb today, she could have wrapped her wrists ... and maybe obtained some climbing shoes ... and hell, a belay harness while she was at it; why not wish for the complete set, if she was wishing anyway?
She looked above her at the sphinx's overhanging brow ridge. This was probably the trickiest part of the whole climb, getting up there. On the cheek, she was moving laterally and had a slight depression to cling to. Here, she'd be going up, straight across the face. The eye socket projected slightly, so she'd have something, but it would have been challenging enough if she was fresh and properly dressed. Tired and cold, with her fingers already tingling from the abuse they'd taken—could she do it?
I haven't come this far to turn back now.
She took a deep, bracing breath, and reached out to get a secure grip on the sphinx's eye socket. Lucky, I know you're probably busy, but if you could throw a little luck my way right now, I could really use it.
Despite the cold weighing her down, despite the fatal clumsiness growing with every movement, she dared not hurry—in fact, for this, she had to make herself slow down and take each step with exquisite care. Often she hung immobile for minutes at a time, like a lizard on a wall, studying the problem in front of her and then carefully, so carefully, planting her hand or foot in a new location.
Step by cold, painful step, she inched up the sphinx's brow. She was so close now. Looking up, she could see the railing above her.
So close ...
Her fingers slipped.
There was an instant when she almost caught herself on her other three points of contact—almost. Then her other hand came loose and she could feel herself going over backward, suspended in midair with her weight unstoppably, fatally overbalancing into the blue void behind her.
Time seemed to slow. She had all the time she needed and more, to feel herself going over, to send a wordless apology to Lucky and to her friends back at the SCB, to—
To hear a sudden fast scuttling of claws above her; to see something small and reptilian leap through the bars of the railing, erupting to humanshape in midair—
A strong hand closed around her wrist.
Jen's weight nearly jerked them both off the climbing surface, but somehow, impossibly, the other woman clung, even though she was head-down and holding Jen with one hand. Jen stared up at her, at the olive-skinned face with wide dark-green eyes, framed with swinging bobbed hair. It was the woman who had been in her room. The recognition hit her again, shifter kinship combined with a sharp awareness of the resemblance between this woman's face and Lucky's.
And the way she was hanging on—
She was partly shifted. Her body, limbs, and head were human, as was the hand holding Jen's wrist. But the fingers of the hand clinging to the sphinx were distorted and extended into long, crooked claws, leaving scrape marks in the sphinx's brow. Her legs were normal to the knees, and then they twisted the wrong way, bending backward to grip the lower bars of the balcony railing with prehensile, clawed toes. As a further point of safety, she had a tail, long and scaly, wrapped around the balcony.
Jen had never seen someone in a stable half-transformation before. She hadn't even realized it was possible.
"Lucia?" she gasped.
"Come inside," the woman said, her voice only a little strained. "We should talk."
Chapter Thirteen
The apartment inside the sphinx's head was even more palatial than Jen had anticipated from the outside.
The sliding glass doors of the balcony opened onto a mezzanine furnished with comfortable little groups of tables and chairs. A spiral staircase led down to the main level; Jen glimpsed plush carpets, potted plants everywhere, and a kitchen large enough to serve a restaurant, though its spotless granite countertops hinted it was hardly ever used. The stairs continued on down to an even lower level, where she could just see the edge of a swimming pool with a pool cover drawn over it.
Lucia had shifted fully human as soon as they were on the balcony. She strode briskly along the mezzanine and flicked on the light in what appeared to be a combination closet and dressing room, bigger than Jen and Lucky's entire suite. She selected a red and black robe for herself and slung it around her shoulders, then pulled down another. "Here, you can put this on over your clothes. You're half frozen. Do you want something hot to—?"
She broke off in mid-sentence as she turned to look at Jen. For a moment she just stood there, the robe around her shoulders gaping open, the other one dangling limply from her hand. Then she said, very quietly, "Don't you want to put the gun down, Miss Cho?"
"Gun?" Jen said blankly, and looked down at her hands.
Oh.
That gun.
It was a small, square Glock 9, black and lethal-looking. She had no idea where it had come from—no, wait. Now she remembered its weight in the pocket of the jacket as she'd climbed, pulling her off balance. But ... she hadn't even noticed ...
She'd stolen a uniform. Not a gun. Why do I have a gun?<
br />
And why was she holding it on Lucia?
But it only seemed natural. She had come up here to—to—
To find Lucia, of course.
It had been very important to find Lucia. It had been all she could think about.
Lucia took a careful step forward, barefoot on the carpet. She held out her hand. Her voice stayed soft, despite the tension in her face. "Give the gun to me, please, Miss Cho. You know you don't want to shoot me. That's not your thought at all."
Wasn't it?
Lucia was ... dangerous. A threat. But that didn't make sense. She hadn't done anything threatening at all. She'd saved Jen's life.
She ... was a dragon? Could that be it? But Lucky was also a dragon. And Jen certainly wasn't afraid of Lucky.
Jen normally had a rock-solid shooting grip, but now her hands began to shake, the muzzle of the gun wavering. "I don't know what's happening," she said in a small voice.
"Someone's been messing with your head, Miss Cho," Lucia said calmly. "Has Lucky told you about his cousin Angel, and what Angel can do?"
Powerful waves of trembling passed through her. "But I—I haven't even met him."
"Miss Cho," Lucia said, her voice gentle. She was so close now her outstretched fingertips could almost touch the gun pointed at her heart. "You wouldn't know it if you had. Especially if he was going to send you up here to kill me. He would have made you forget."
With a violent jerk, Jen dropped the gun as if it were a live snake. Instinct caught up with her a fraction of a second later—that's no way to treat a loaded firearm!—but Lucia, with lightning reflexes, had already caught it.
"Oh God. Oh God." Jen covered her mouth with her hands. She couldn't stop shaking. "I was going to shoot you in the back. I ... I almost did shoot you. And I have no idea why."
"It's not you. You're only the latest victim of one of Angel's ridiculous games." Lucia ejected the gun's magazine and racked the slide with practiced hands. She put the gun in one pocket of her robe, the magazine in the other, and belted it firmly around her. "Now. Put that on—" She poked, with her toe, the robe she'd dropped when she caught the gun. "—and come downstairs with me. We'll have something hot to drink. Coffee? Tea?"
"Coffee would be nice," Jen said numbly. She picked up the robe with hands that still shook.
Lucia trotted down the stairs, as casually as if she hadn't just been looking down the barrel of a gun. Jen followed more slowly, trying not to trip over the hem of her robe—Lucia was several inches taller, and it brushed the floor—while she desperately searched her memory for any mysterious gaps. Things were a little vague and disordered, but not too badly. She couldn't account for every minute of the day since she'd left Lucky. She could have run into Angel at any point while she was searching the ship: in the stairwell, in the Deck A shopping arcade, down in the sub-deck storage area, out on the catwalk before she began her climb. Maybe even yesterday.
And she wouldn't have any idea.
She wanted to cry in terror and violation. It was fury that allowed her to beat back the tears. How dare you, Angel. How dare you use me like this. How dare you break into my mind, you asshole.
And what else did you do while you were in there?
Was she going to pull a gun on Lucky next?
"Sit," Lucia said. She was filling a French press coffee machine from a sleek, stainless-steel coffee grinder. An electric kettle steamed on the countertop. "I know how you're probably feeling right now. I can only imagine what it's like, since he can't influence me. But Angel's commands aren't that sophisticated. Among other things, I'm fairly sure he can't implant more than one imperative at a time, or they start to conflict with each other and don't work at all. If he had a long time to work on you, it'd be different, but he can't possibly since you've only been on board for a few days. So, if you're worrying about other trip wires in your head, it's not very likely. Everything he set you up with was most likely pointed at me."
"I can't remember talking to him at all." Jen took one of the high, bar-style seats and rested her hands on the counter, folding them over each other to still their trembling. "I'm trying and trying, but I can't."
"Unfortunately, that's one thing he's very good at. You probably never will."
"Great." Jen pressed her fingertips to her closed eyelids, startled at how cold her hands were. "Lucia, I am so sorry. This isn't how I wanted our first proper meeting to go at all. Er ... you are Lucia Lucado, aren't you?" She looked up, her investigative instincts surfacing as her panic and misery began to ebb. "And you're also Lux, unless I am very wrong."
Lucia laughed softly. "You are quite astute. And a step ahead of me, because I have absolutely no idea who you are. Jennifer Cho is an annoyingly common name, and I have nothing else to go on, since you appear to have come aboard with nothing but the clothes on your back. Enlighten me?"
Jen managed a shaky smile. "If your coffee's good, I'll think about it."
Lucia drew a cup off the French press and handed it to her. Jen wrapped her cold hands around it and drew in a deep lungful of the aroma. Ambrosia ... though ambrosia in desperate need of sweetening. "Sugar?"
"Oh, you're one of those people." Lucia opened a gleaming steel-fronted cabinet that had nothing at all in it except for a honey pot with a wooden dipper, and placed it in front of her. Jen studied it thoughtfully. She'd never seen a honey dipper, with the little wooden baffles and everything, except in Honey Bunches of Oats commercials from her childhood. Were you supposed to stir with it? Oh well, if Lucia thought it was terribly gauche, then she could provide proper coffee add-ins. Jen dipped out a quantity of honey that made Lucia's eyes widen, especially when she stirred it all in.
"This is free-trade coffee from a tiny private concern in the Kenyan uplands. Some of the best coffee in the world. It's three hundred dollars a pound."
"You should buy Maxwell House. It's much cheaper."
Lucia shook her head and pursed her lips in distaste.
"But seriously," Jen went on. "How can you trust me enough to sit here and have coffee with me? I just tried to kill you."
"You didn't. Angel did."
"Yes ... but ..." She looked down at her hands, steady now on the coffee cup, but white-knuckled. "You can't trust anyone, can you? We can't. Anyone on the ship could be following one of Angel's commands. They could stab you, poison your food ... try to shoot you in the back ..."
"And now you know what living with him is like." Lucia's voice was curiously gentle.
"Are you sure he couldn't have implanted anything else in my mind?"
"Hmm." Lucia placed her untouched coffee cup on a sideboard and made a beckoning gesture. "There's a way to be sure. Come here."
Jen hopped down from her bar stool and followed. They crossed approximately an acre of carpet to a door decorated with another Egyptian-style painting, this one depicting a bedchamber scene. The bedroom behind the door was, unsurprisingly, the size of a small house. The few items of furniture looked antique and old. The bed was enormous and round, with a gold frame—that better not be actual gold, Jen thought—and a dark-red bedspread. It looked like something out of a fairy tale.
The door to the closet stood open, revealing a staircase leading up. After a moment's assessment of the apartment's layout, Jen realized they were directly below the room Lucia had retrieved the robes from. She had a two-story closet. At least two stories. No telling what's above and below us.
Lucia crossed another vast expanse of carpet to the bed, and opened a drawer in the claw-footed bedside table. Jen sat on the edge of the bed, because no way was she passing up an opportunity to sit on a bed that might have cost more than a middle-class family home.
In contrast to the austere neatness of the bedroom, the drawers of the bedside table were a mess. Lucia poked through makeup, tangled strands of pearls, paperback novels, receipts, and a variety of other things before extracting a small jeweled clutch. From the outside it looked like a makeup case; inside, it contained a foam eggshell f
illing with the by-now-familiar little glass vials nestling in the padding. Lucia picked up one of these with her fingernails.
"Dragon's Tears," Jen murmured.
"Indeed." Lucia held the vial up to the light. The contents glimmered softly. "In addition to the qualities I'm sure you know about, there is another benefit you'll receive from ingesting these. You'll have a limited protection from my cousin's abilities."
Jen whistled. "That's quite a side effect."
Lucia nodded, displaying a quick flash of a smile. "It makes sense if you think about it. Dragons' abilities don't work on other dragons. For a very limited time, your body thinks you are a dragon, in extremely restricted but useful ways. Angel doesn't know this, by the way. I discovered it by accident after healing one of the servants. Now I take advantage of it as necessary. I have taken great pains to be sure he never finds out." She held out the vial to Jen. "Swallow this, and you'll be free of him."
Jen wasn't sure if it was just her imagination, but the little glass vial felt slightly warm in her hand. "Just to check, this is also intoxicating and addictive, right?"
"Yes," Lucia said. "Many people consider the benefits worth it. I would venture to think that right now, you're probably one of them."
"You're right," Jen sighed.
She rolled the vial around in her palm, then popped the cap and swallowed the contents quickly, before she could change her mind. It felt hot going down, blazing a little trail of fire down her esophagus to her stomach. She washed it down with a large swig of coffee, but it still seemed that she could feel it inside her, burning like an ember.
