Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  River Monsters

  ONCE I HAD A GUTFUL of icy cold sloshing around in my stomach, I shut my eyes and floated on my back in the shallows with my heels and butt and fingertips dragging in the sand. It’d been a long day, and instead of getting some sleep the night before, I’d gotten killed. That’ll wear you out.

  I realized I’d messed up the second I felt something dripping on my forehead. I jackknifed up into a sitting position, splashing water everywhere, and smacked face-first into the top of a mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth wide as my hand.

  Which also happened to be coming down to chomp me in half.

  I freaked out, inhaling water and splashing and scrambling, but it was like one of those dreams where you try to run and can’t get away. The teeth were slamming down too fast, and the water felt like it was dragging me under. Images of my legs sticking out of the mouth of some prehistoric megalodon flashed through my brain unhelpfully.

  Then someone grabbed my arm and jerked. I caught a split-second glimpse of black hair and opal-colored eyes with weird lacy patterns in them, then I heard wood splinter behind me. A rib-shaking roar tore through the shut-in.

  “Come on!” the girl who’d grabbed me yelled, dragging me toward the bank.

  I sloshed through the water with her, hauling backside now that I was on my feet.

  We ran out onto the rocky shore, and a calf-deep wave hit us in the back of the legs. I swung around, figuring I could at least block that monster from eating her, but it was gone. All I caught was a translucent blue-green fin as tall as I was slicing back down into the deeper part of the stream.

  “It’s okay,” the girl said, finally letting go of my arm. “We’re safe. Creek carp can’t walk on land until after their third molt. Their adolescent legs aren’t strong enough to support them.”

  I’m pretty sure my eyes got as big as my fists. “There are versions of that thing that can walk?”

  “Adults.” She shrugged. “But none of them can breathe on land, so they’re not in it for an extended chase. Carp are more ambush predators. The carnivorous ones are, anyway.”

  “Should we—I don’t know—get out of here?” I pointed up at the red sandy tops of the gorge. “Climb back up top?”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I still have day sun to burn and materials to scavenge.”

  The girl had black hair twisted into two messy buns, and she was wearing a set of welding goggles pushed up on her head. What really got my attention, though, was the eyes I’d seen when I was about to be chomped in half. They were huge, and instead of irises and whites, she had this black lace pattern.

  Realizing I was staring, I glanced at the wispy trees and undergrowth surrounding us. There was an awful lot of brush on this side of the stream. Plenty of space for something big and hungry to hide.

  “What if one of them sneaks up behind us?” I asked.

  “I’ve got my fish-finder on.” She tapped the big screen on her wrist like that would save us. “It’ll go off if one gets close enough to do any damage.”

  “Isn’t ‘close enough to snap us in half’ too late?”

  She glared at me, and the black lace in her eyes got darker and thicker. “It’s a prototype, okay? When it reliably alarms at close distances, then I’ll be able to recalibrate its radar to scan a larger diameter.”

  Right about then I realized I was arguing with a cute alien girl about man-eating mega-carp early warning systems, and my words dried up. Under normal circumstances, I wasn’t great at talking to the opposite sex, and the girls at my school had never wanted anything to do with trash like me anyway. This was probably the longest conversation I’d had with one since puberty struck and even just saying hi to them got complicated.

  She bent down, picked up a huge backpack stitched together out of gunnysacks, and slung it onto her shoulder with a metallic clinking. Once she had it on, she turned toward the trees.

  “Hey, uh...” I took a step to follow her, then realized that might be kind of stalkery. I stopped where I was and stuck my hands in my pockets. “I mean, can you point the way to the nearest town?”

  The branches behind her rustled, and I forgot all about being awkward and started looking around for a stick or a really big rock I could clobber a river monster with.

  Instead of a fish, though, a heavyset guy came out of the trees. He was the same tan as the girl and had the same big lace-patterned eyes. His black hair was shaggy, and he had on a ragged sleeveless shirt, long cutoff shorts that used to be pants at some point, and wooden sandals. If not for the eyes, he would’ve looked like an overweight surfer dude from Earth.

  “You fed that carp my walking stick,” he said, flicking his hair out of his face with a jerk of his head.

  “I’ll find you another one,” the girl said.

  “It’s not about the stick, Kest, it’s about you stealing my stuff.”

  “If I’d had time to ask, I would’ve. Besides, the carp was going to eat this guy.” She turned to me. “Guy, would you rather I stopped to ask Rali if I could use his stick to jam the carp’s teeth open or make it so you lived long enough to question my methods with him?”

  I looked at him. “Sorry, man, I got to go with the one where I don’t get eaten.”

  He laughed.

  “I bear no ill will toward you, new friend,” he said, putting his palms flat against each other like he was praying and bowing over them. “My twin’s the only one I want to make feel bad.”

  Twins. That explained it. You could definitely see the family resemblance, even though the guy was on the chubby side.

  “He’s not our friend, Rali.” The girl, Kest, shoved a wispy branch up and ducked under it into the trees. Her voice filtered back to us. “He’s a criminal.”

  “No, I’m not.” I followed her into the foliage.

  She had come out in a clearing and was wandering along the cliff wall, head down like she was searching for something in the sand.

  “We saw the transport shuttle fly over,” she said.

  Rali came through the brush and joined us. “That’s true. If you’d been here before that, we would’ve known. We don’t get many new faces out here.”

  “No, I mean, I came by the shuttle, but I’m not a criminal,” I said. “It’s a mistake. I don’t think I’m even supposed to be in this universe. See, there was this methhead in my house, and I think one of us got stabbed, then this ditzy grim reaper screwed up and took me instead of him because our names sound alike or something. She got mad when I called her on it, then I dropped through the stars and landed on the shuttle.”

  Rali was smiling like he didn’t believe me. Kest hadn’t even stopped walking.

  “Okay, that all sounds made up,” I said. “But it’s true.” I scrubbed my hands down my face in frustration. “My dad used to make crap up all the time to make it sound like he wasn’t the bad guy, but I’m not like him. I’m not a criminal, I promise. It really happened.”

  When I said that, it was like a shock wave went through the air. This was real. I wasn’t dreaming. It was all really happening. To me.

  Suddenly, I got lightheaded. Sound fuzzed out, and the ground tilted back and forth. Neither of the twins seemed to notice. I grabbed for a tree, but my fingers felt numb. They slid off the sappy bark.

  Then I was flat on my back looking up at Rali and Kest. The lace patterns in their eyes shifted slowly from thin to wide then back again.

  “Are you all right?” Rali’s voice sounded far away.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. It sounded crazy loud inside my head. “I think I really died.”

  Kest blinked and looked down at her giant watch screen.

  A little at a time, the sound of the rushing stream and the wind in the trees came back.

  “I don’t think he’s lying,” Rali said like he was amazed.

  “He thinks he’s telling the truth,” Kest said, turning her wrist to show him her watch.

  “You can’t trust technology for that kind of thing,” her b
rother argued. “It can’t think for itself.”

  “Yet,” she said. “But it can read his brain chemicals, heart palpitations, and sweat glands. He’s got all the markers of someone who suffered a recent traumatic experience, but none of the markers of insanity. None of the physiological ones, anyway.”

  “Are you guys dead, too?” I asked them. “Like, is this the afterlife? Were you dropped here by a different reaper?”

  “No, we were born on Van Diemann.” Kest frowned down at me. “The only things that drop people here are CPA shuttles.”

  “My gut says we trust him,” Rali said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Kest snorted, but didn’t stop Rali when he stuck out his hand and helped me stand up.

  “Thanks.” I meant for believing my crazy story, too, not just the hand.

  He shrugged. “If you’re not a criminal, then you should probably stick with us.”

  “What’s your name?” Kest said, leaning up against the rock wall. She didn’t look at me while she said it, just stared down at her watch screen.

  “Grady Hake. Everybody just calls me Hake, though.”

  Rali did that praying-slash-bowing thing again. “Iye Skal Akarali.” Then he cracked a grin. “Grady Hake’s a weird name for a human. Were you raised by some other race?”

  “What?”

  “Humans usually have tough-sounding, ‘Meat Roaches will rise again’ type names,” he said. “The ones our age do, anyway.”

  “Like Warcry?”

  “That’s a popular one. One of the original Meat Roaches from the Ylef-Human War named her kid that, now all the humans are doing it.”

  “There’s no Grady Hake in the Van Diemann profiles,” Kest interrupted.

  “You’ve met my sister, Iye Skal Irakest,” Rali said. “As you can tell, she doesn’t observe societal niceties.”

  I laughed.

  “I mean, she saved my life, so I’ve got to cut her some slack,” I joked.

  Kest ignored us. “I checked the new arrivals’ profiles to make sure you weren’t giving us a fake name, but your picture isn’t on the rankings.” She let her watch-arm drop and looked up at me. “You really aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “Rankings?” I frowned. “What rankings?”

  “The Spirit rankings. Every planet keeps a public record of its citizens’ Spirit that shows in real time how you stack up against any other citizen. If you’re not on it, then you’ve never been given a Universal implant, which means you were never born.”

  “Or you removed your implant to protest being a part of a system designed to conflate meaningless numbers with achievement,” Rali said.

  Kest rolled her eyes. “You’re the only one who did that, and you just did it to seem like some cool nonconformist.”

  “I did it because I like my privacy.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I’m not the only one. The Beggar Clan—”

  “Is just a story,” his sister said. “The only real universal gangs are the Big Five.”

  Behind her back, Rali shook his head at me.

  “Some aliens—” I cut off, because I didn’t want to be a jerk, and who even knew if they were aliens on this planet. Maybe I was the alien. “Some people were talking about the Big Five when we got off the shuttle. What are they?”

  “They’re gangs,” Kest said. “And if you want to stay off the record, then they’re the ones you want to avoid.”

  “Easier said than done,” Rali said. “Considering they run this planet and a good number of the others.”

  Stealing from the Dead

  WE WALKED DOWN THE shut-in toward the part where its sides came together and the crystalline blue-green water disappeared under a flat rock wall. The stones under our feet ran out, replaced by soft reddish sand, and we came to a stand of willow-like trees. None of them was taller than chest-high, but they’d grown in tight. I stretched up on my toes. Looked like the trees went on for a dozen yards at least. If the twins were determined to get to the end of the shut-in, then this last little bit was going to be a slog.

  Kest definitely looked interested in getting through, but Rali had other matters on his mind.

  “Would’ve been great if you killed that carp,” he said, looking at the deep pool in front of the wall. “Nothing tastes better after a long day scavenging than creek carp with wild herbs roasted over a wood fire. Smoky, tangy, and with just a pinch of salt.”

  I’d never been big on fish that wasn’t deep-fried, but the last thing I’d eaten had been hours ago. My mouth watered at the thought of hot food, and my stomach grumbled.

  “You never scavenge anything, Rali,” Kest said, shoving some of the willow-like branches out of the way. The little trees weren’t bendy like willows on Earth. The branches snapped back, cracking like whips. One snapped her on the arm, and she hissed.

  “That’s because I don’t need anything,” Rali said. “I’ve got the clothes on my back, a new friend from another world, and fond memories of a really nice walking stick. What more does a man need?”

  “Money.” Kest glanced at where the water bubbled up at the edge of the rock wall before disappearing underneath. Judging by how dark blue it was, that pool was deep enough to hold plenty more of the fish monster that had tried to eat me.

  “So, that’s what you guys were doing down here?” I asked. “Scavenging?”

  “I like to think of it as stealing from the dead,” Rali said, grinning.

  The lace in Kest’s eyes got darker, and her lips smashed into a thin line.

  “It’s not like they need it anymore.” She set her bag down and dug inside. Metal shifted and clanked as she groped around. “Besides, all the best components get washed down here.”

  Rali looked at me. “Because nobody else is crazy enough to come down in the shut-ins looking for them.”

  “Why?”

  “Chaos creatures hunt the Shut-Ins.”

  “They won’t come out while the day suns’re still up.” Kest pulled out a long flat piece of rusty metal that looked like one side of a blade from a brush hog and tossed that down on the sand.

  I glanced up at the sky, noticing the black sun and its dark orange-magenta halo creeping over the far edge of the gorge wall.

  “The shuttle driver said they come out when the night sun rises,” I said.

  “Folks from other planets are always getting that wrong,” Rali said. “Chaos creatures only come out after dark thirty, when the day suns are down. Rays from the day suns kill them.”

  “We think,” Kest said, pulling a metal hatchet handle out of her bag. “It’s not like anyone is studying chaos creatures. As far as we know, the ones down here are the only ones in the universe. Further study is needed.”

  Rali smirked. “But no one wants to die, so no one does it.”

  “Are they vampires or something?” I asked.

  “Vampires?” he asked, forehead wrinkling with confusion.

  “Undead corpses that suck your blood and explode into dust if sunlight touches them.”

  He thought about it. “No, I don’t think so. These eat life force, not blood.”

  “Oh.”

  On the ground, Kest was patting her pockets and muttering, “Rods, rods...”

  She lit up when she found a handful of thin metal sticks in her back pocket. She spent a few seconds aligning the mower blade a few inches down the metal handle, then she pulled her goggles on and touched the rod to the metal.

  It sizzled and strobed just like a real welder, so bright I couldn’t look directly at it. Sparks flew, throwing melted bits of red-hot slag into the sand.

  I wrinkled my nose as the hot metal smell of welding hit me.

  “Holy cow.” I raised my voice to be heard over the sound of Kest’s improv metal shop project. “Does she have a welder cybernetically implanted in her hand or something?”

  Rali stared at me like he had when I asked about vampires.

  I pointed. “How is she doing that?”

  “Oh! Her Spirit ty
pe is Metal,” he said like that explained it.

  Kest sat back on her heels and pushed up her goggles, then inspected the blade-and-handle combo. The weld-point was still glowing red-hot, so she shoveled a couple handfuls of wet sand onto it, then washed it off in the stream.

  “Hm.” She gave it a test swing. “Durability’s not going to be great. And I should’ve added an angle for power.”

  “You’re going to use it one time,” Rali said.

  “That’s not an excuse for shoddy craftsmanship.”

  He rolled his eyes and looked at me. “Artificers, am I right?”

  I kind of half got the joke, but sometimes my mouth makes up for what my brain misses out on.

  “For me, she’s still coasting on the whole saving my life thing,” I said.

  That got him laughing.

  Kest threw her bag back over her shoulder and waded into the willows, hacking a path with her new machete.

  “I’ll wait out here,” Rali said. He tapped his nose. “My olfactory receptors get sensitive on an empty stomach.”

  I shrugged and followed Kest into the trees.

  “How did you weld that with your hand?” I asked her, catching up.

  “Metal Spirit.”

  “Right. That doesn’t tell me anything, actually. What’s Metal Spirit?”

  She looked over her shoulder at me. “You know. Elemental supertype with a Metal specialization?”

  “I know what ghost spirits are and what liquor spirits are. Not what metal spirits are.”

  Kest grunted as a willow branch popped her across the arm, then spun around and started hacking the one that got her. I took a couple steps back.

  “Don’t you have kishotenketsu where you come from?” she asked.

  “I’ve never heard that word before in my life, so I’m going to say probably not.”

  “You don’t have Spirit?” She sounded like she didn’t believe me. “Like, at all?”