by Rich Larson
And so Mateo is only a vessel to him. A tool. The way Scipio was a tool to his uncle in filthy Juarez and has been a tool to El Tirano for all the years since. Rage is boiling under Scipio’s skin, making his hands shake. Rage at the physician, for telling him this, for condemning Mateo to death. Rage at the accountant for planning it, and at El Tirano for planning something even worse.
What Scipio thought was El Tirano’s love for Mateo was only love for himself.
“If I take him away?” Scipio asks. “Take him far from his father?”
The physician shakes his head. “When the components dissolve, it will poison him. In a week, in a month. It will kill him.”
“When will he wake up?” Scipio asks, his finger drifting to the trigger of his gun.
“The sedative should wear off within an hour,” the physician says. “What happens after that will be your—”
Scipio’s bullet punches through the bridge of his nose and leaves a greasy red-and-gray splatter on the locker behind him. Sol’s man blinks, steps back. Scipio shoots him, too.
He goes to the cot and covers Mateo’s scrawny body with a blanket. Maybe he should have forced the physician to try, at gunpoint, to take the weapon out. Maybe he should have tortured him.
Maybe he should smother Mateo in his sleep now. Would that be more merciful?
Scipio loads a fresh clip into his handgun and checks the blade of his knife. An hour is long enough for him to kill the others and hide their bodies where Mateo won’t see them on the way out. Mateo will feel safe when he dies. Maybe he will even feel happy. And Scipio will answer to one less puppeteer.
He kisses his fingers and touches them to the boy’s clammy forehead, leaving tiny smears of blood behind.
* * *
The fireball unfurls from Mateo’s body and consumes him and his father in an instant; a clap of superheated air washes across the whole room.
Screaming. The courtesans are scrambling away, dragging each other to safety. The padre’s robes have caught fire and he rolls but the ethanol in his sweat has made him into living tinder. Scipio looks for the accountant, but the small, black-clad man has vanished. Scipio looks for Nazaret, who told him everything burns eventually, but in the chaos he can’t extract her painted face from the others.
The fireball expands, swallowing the throne, making the spidersilk blacken and shrivel. People are running all around him, some of Sol’s soldiers fleeing, others hurling buckets of water at the blaze. Scipio stands there and lets the heat ripple across his face, watching the beast’s great ribs crack and collapse how the rafters of his childhood home must have cracked and collapsed.
Flames lick up and down the length of the skeleton, turning the flowers to gray ash in an instant, charring the bone and making the metal bolts groan and sway. The corpses dangling from its tail alight one by one, their bacterial coats swelling and popping like maggots. At last the joints collapse and the skeleton crashes to the floor, its bones sliding, snapping.
Scipio stands, watching it crumble and blacken until only the skull is left intact, empty-eyed, grinning into the void. Then he makes his way out of the bone room, sliding through the panicked crowd like a shade.
He will travel to Parera and clean his hands in its ashes, and then he will return to see what sort of throne the accountant has built for himself. And if it is not to his liking, he will destroy that one, too.
He was El Cuervo, who could kill anybody, and now he is the meteor.
About the Author
Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and now writes from Grande Prairie, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon, featured on io9, and appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Rich Larson
Art copyright © 2018 by Jeffrey Alan Love
