by eden Hudson
“Welcome to your workplace for the next three sixty-six,” the Bailiff said, flashing those brush-teeth at me. “Get that door for us.”
The ghost hand shoved me to a wooden screen and held me in place until I opened it for the jerkwad. He sauntered in, then the ghost hand dragged me behind him.
The Winchester on my wrist beeped. I frowned and looked down at it.
“If you check that message while I’m talking to you, I’m likely to get a touch miffed,” the Bailiff said, bringing out that tattoo shock remote. “Let it be, or I’ll take the starch right out of your collar. Got me?”
I nodded.
His black eyes glittered. “I like to hear vocal assent. Nobody wants to stand around talking to himself all day, now do they?” His thumb hovered over the script markings on the remote. “So, when I ask if you got me...”
“Yeah,” I said. “I got you.”
“Mr. Bailiff, sir.”
That’s when my brain finally snapped.
“Mr. Dickface, sir.”
I don’t know how long he held down the trigger of the remote, but it felt like at least a million years. The pain was so bad I was ready to promise him I’d lick his boots and tell him thank you, sir if he’d just stop.
When it finally did end, I was on the dirty wood plank floor of the Distilling Company building, picking up dirt like one of those gym-floor mops and panting like I’d just run a hundred miles.
The Bailiff grinned down at me. “You were saying?”
I swallowed, my arms and legs still jittery from aftershocks.
“Mr. Bailiff, sir,” I forced out, my voice cracking.
“Smart boy.” One of his ghost hands dragged me back to my feet. “For a human, anyway. Now, Smart Boy, meet Muta’i, Master Distiller and OSS 7.”
Standing there in front of me was an honest-to-God minotaur—bull’s legs with fat black hooves, ripped human torso, and a huge bull’s head and neck growing out of his meaty shoulders, the whole nine yards. He was wearing an apron but no shirt, like some kind of blacksmith stereotype, and his fur was a brindled gold and black. His horns had been drilled through and pierced with dangly gold rings. I had to tip my head back to look him in the eye. He was at least eight feet tall.
“Shogun Takiru said you were coming.” Muta’i’s voice was like the deep rumble of bass from a tricked-out truck down the street.
He took a step closer, then leaned down and sniffed my face. His breath stunk like beer and hot grass, and he smelled like sweat and burning hair. I decided to hold off on breathing until he backed up.
Muta’i crossed his bodybuilder arms over his apron. “His Spirit stomata aren’t even open.”
“That’s why we brung him to you,” the Bailiff said, rocking on his heels. “Sorry brat doesn’t even know his Spirit type.”
“Hold him still.”
Ghost arms grabbed me by the shoulders. I tried twisting away, but they locked me in place.
Gold light blasted off the minotaur and slammed into me. A shock wave ran through my whole body, kind of like when I’d eaten Rali’s Coffee Drank flour ball, but this time going from the outside in. For a second, it felt like my skin was trying to lift off my body. Then it was over.
“Stomata opened.” Muta’i grabbed my tattooed arm in one huge paw and turned it over so that the elbow was facing him. With his other hand, he dug into the pocket of his apron and pulled out something that looked like a price scanner gun from a supermarket.
Every instinct I had was telling me to mouth off or fight back, but for once I bit the inside of my cheek and stopped myself. I didn’t need to end up on the floor again, not yet. This was definitely happening, and probably my best option was to get it over with.
Muta’i ran the scanner up my arm, then pressed it to my stomach, then my forehead. It beeped out a series of notes like a calculator playing a funeral song.
“Mortal affinity,” he read off the back of the scanner.
The Bailiff let out a low whistle. “Well, if that ain’t something. I knew you were a good investment when I first laid eyes on you, Smart Boy.”
“Want your usual commission?” Muta’i asked him.
“I surely do,” the Bailiff said.
Muta’i plodded through the distillery and disappeared into a back room.
“Looks like we’ve found your job for the year,” the Bailiff said, turning to me. “Cultivating Mortal Spirit for the OSS’s higher-tier customers. Mortal’s not a popular request by any means, because so few have a true affinity for it, but a couple of our most important clients want it. In fact, Shogun Drako of the Jianjiao has a Mortal supertype, so if we can feed him the pure stuff instead of the distilled, we’ll become his number one contractor.”
The door to the back swung open, and Muta’i ducked into the front room. He had a big hunk of metal and wire in his hands.
“That, Smart Boy, is the Transferogate,” the Bailiff said, either not willing to wait for the minotaur to explain or just not tired of hearing himself talk yet. “At the end of each day, it’ll transfer the Spirit you’ve cultivated to the distillery’s stores, which will then be sold and shipped to our clients.”
Without a word, Muta’i jerked my shirt off over my head and slid the hunk of metal onto my arm. It sat on my right shoulder like a one-sided pauldron from some techno-fantasy video game. While he adjusted and snapped and bolted it together, the Bailiff went on lecturing as if he were getting paid by the word.
“You’ll have a daily quota to meet, a minimum amount of Spirit you’ll need to gather before transfer time. Miss your quota and you don’t eat. Pretty simple, right?”
Muta’i flipped a switch behind my back. The Transferogate let out a pneumatic hiss as it sucked tight to my skin. Something pinched in my armpit, then twisted inside my chest. I flinched.
“Yeah, pretty simple,” I said, trying to wiggle my fingers under the metal and unpinch my skin. “Except for the part where I don’t know what cultivation is, how you get Spirit, what you do with it, or what you need it for.”
Looking back, that definitely could’ve been an opportunity for the Bailiff to hit the script remote again, but he just chuckled and bounced a little on the balls of his feet.
“None of that is my problem,” he said. “Muta’i will give you the tutorial if he feels like it, or he can let you starve while you try to figure it out. I don’t care much one way or the other, because I’ll still get my commission for bringing you in until you drop dead or your year’s over.” He patted the hunk of metal on my shoulder with one webbed hand. “At the end of every day, our good buddy the Transferogate will send ten percent of whatever Spirit you’ve amassed straight to my reserves. Now, I use Air Spirit myself, a variation of the Elemental supertype, but I don’t mind the extra distilling practice it takes to change Mortal to Elemental and then to Air.” He thumped his chest a couple times. “It’s good for keeping the Spirit sea in fighting shape.”
I finally wormed my fingers under the Transferogate. They bumped against a piece of wire poking me. I tried to bend it so it wasn’t sticking me, but when it moved, something in my chest moved, too. It went all the way through the meat into my insides. That made me panic a little, and I tried to yank it out.
A Mack truck of pain slammed into me.
When I could think again, I was on my hands and knees, sweating and slobbering onto the distillery floor.
“Don’t tamper with the Spirit transfer probe,” Muta’i said in that flat bass voice.
“Best advice a surrogate can get.” The Bailiff held up the script remote. “I didn’t even have to activate it. The Transferogate automatically calibrates to its user’s tattoo script, and if they try to take the probe off or disable it—zap-o!”
I wiped some of the drool off my chin with the back of one hand. The ghost arms reached for me to stand me up again, but I slapped them away and stood up on my own.
The Bailiff chuckled.
“As you like it.” He flipped the remote to
Muta’i. “You’re gonna want this while you’re showing our new pal here the ropes. Humans are a little slower on the uptake than the surrogates you’re used to handling. You have a good time, now, Smart Boy. Get me lots of Spirit.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled out the door, whistling. The screen banged shut behind him.
Muta’i and I looked at each other.
“You gonna attack me?” he asked.
I made my fists and jaw unclench.
“Not unless I want to die,” I said, adding, again, in my head.
He let out a bovine snort that might’ve been a laugh and stuck the script remote in his apron pocket. “Then let’s get to work.”
Spirit Surrogate
MY T-SHIRT WOULDN’T fit on over the Transferogate, so I hooked it in my back pocket as I followed Muta’i through the distillery. He led me into the back room, a maze of shelves filled with brown bottles wrapped with handwritten labels.
“Counterfeiting elixirs is my specialty,” he said. “Some are real, some are worthless knockoffs, some are poison. Only I know the difference, so steal at your own risk.”
“What’s the point in making knockoffs?” I asked him.
“Money,” he said, then motioned for me to follow.
We went through another door, outside into a dusty little garden full of cactuses, rocks, and tumbleweeds. A board fence surrounded the place, and a little stream of water ran down a series of miniature wooden sluice gates to a shallow pool made from black plastic set into the red sand.
Two other people were already there, a green guy with thick, batlike ears sticking up at the top of his head and another shark guy. Sharks must’ve really gotten into a lot of trouble in this universe, just based on how many I’d already come across on Van Diemann. They’d each picked a shady spot in the garden and were sitting with their eyes shut. It looked like they were meditating.
Both had clunky Transferogates attached to their shoulders.
“You can gather Spirit anywhere,” Muta’i told me, “but it’s easiest to do where your type is most concentrated. Most surrogates choose to do it at the distillery because it’s safer back here. No violence allowed, and no warning shots fired for violators.”
The shark guy cracked one eye to check us out, then shut it again. I edged a little farther away from him.
“Having a Mortal affinity, your best cultivation will be done in bone yards, near shallow graves, or anywhere stuff dies regularly. Since all living things eventually die, you can do it anywhere to varying success.”
I put up my hand. “What is Spirit exactly?”
He turned his big bull eyes at me, whites showing in the far corner.
“If you’re pawing the ground with me, we’re gonna have a problem.”
“I’m not doing whatever that is,” I said. “I don’t know anything about this stuff. Not even the basics. Can you teach me or is that against the rules?”
When he scowled, I realized that was probably a pretty disrespectful way to ask. But he didn’t reach for the tattoo script remote. He took a deep breath and huffed it out like that was all he could do to keep his patience.
“Spirit’s the essence of everything. The energy of the universe. The more you have, the better you can maintain your body and soul essences, and the longer you live. Assuming nobody kills you outright.” He looked at me to see if I was tracking. I nodded, so he went on. “Everybody in the universe has Spirit, but not everybody uses it beyond everyday living. None of that matters to you, though.” He pointed one huge beef-link finger at the Transferogate on my shoulder. “All you need to worry about is meeting your quota of Spirit for the day. Sit down.”
I did, keeping my eyes on him. He sat in front of me, hairy legs crossed in a weird cow-human lotus position.
“Shut your eyes.”
That one I didn’t feel so great about. Basically the only thing I’d learned so far about Van Diemann’s Planet was that it sucked and everything on it wanted to kill me. Except maybe Rali and Kest.
“Nobody’s going to gore you,” Muta’i rumbled. “Unless you don’t shut your eyes.”
It took a lot of effort to make my eyelids come down and stay down. I had to squeeze them shut tight, and once they were closed, I was on high alert, listening for any little sound that might mean something wanted a piece of me while I wasn’t looking.
“Breathe in,” the minotaur said. “No, through your nose. Like you’re taking a long smell of fresh green fields.”
I inhaled. It didn’t smell like fresh green fields out in the distillery’s garden; it smelled like dust and hot cow.
“Breathe the Spirit down into your sea,” he said.
I cracked an eyelid, but before I could ask, he pointed at my belly button. I tried the breathing thing again, this time breathing until I expanded my chest and filled up my stomach with air.
“Now let the air out.”
I did.
“Not like that,” he snapped. “You’re letting all the Spirit you just breathed in leak back out, along with half of what you already had. Close your Spirit sea before you exhale.”
I looked at him. “How do I do that?”
“Use your brain. Humans have those, right?” He must’ve seen something he didn’t like on my face then because he pulled out the script remote.
I bit back the smart remark.
He nodded, then said, “Picture the sea in the center of your body. Breathe the Spirit into it, then picture putting a lid on it to trap the Spirit inside. Then breathe out the leftover air.”
I didn’t want to shut my eyes while he had that remote in his hand, but I finally forced them closed again and tried to do what he said. I couldn’t tell whether I was breathing in anything but cow B.O., but after the first couple of breaths, his horn rings jingled.
“Better,” he said. “Not a total disaster, anyway.”
“That’s it?” I asked, looking at him. “I just breathe?”
He shrugged. “You can get as fancy or as simple with it as you want, but that’s the basic idea, breathing in the natural energy of the universe. You should be able to check your progress on your HUD. If that ancient artifact is even capable of reading Spirit level.”
It had been before I fell out of the fight cage to what should’ve been my second death. I touched the Winchester’s cracked screen to wake it up, but it didn’t respond. I tapped it a little harder. That got its attention.
1 Unread Message, Sender Iye Skal Irakest
I wasn’t sure yet how to set that aside for later like you do with text messages, so I hurried up and read it.
Message later if you can, she’d said.
Then I swiped it away and focused on finding my profile with all its stats. After some opening of the wrong menus, I finally located it.
My Spirit was up to 28. Pretty decent increase, considering it had been 9 that morning.
Then I caught sight of a hunk of metal out of the corner of my eye. The Transferogate.
“What’s my quota?” I asked.
“Eighteen hundred Spirit per day.”
A sick feeling pooled in my stomach.
“Are you serious?” I looked down at my cracked screen, then back up at the minotaur. “Eighteen hundred, right out of the gate? There’s not even a training week where I get to learn on the job?”
“Go hungry a couple days,” Muta’i said, groaning as he stood back up. “You’ll start learning pretty fast.”
“But not today, right?” I checked the suns. The white one was at the ten o’clock position in the sky, and the blue one was around two. “It’s probably already half over. There’s no way I can make the quota before tonight.”
The minotaur headed for the back door of the distillery. “There’s always a way. There’s not always a good way, but there’s always a way.”
I jumped up and ran after him. He stopped in the doorway and turned back, glaring down his huge bull nose at me, nostrils flaring.
I backed up a step. �
��Am I just supposed to sit out here breathing for the next year?”
“Or in a boneyard or on a roof or under your cot in the servants’ stables,” he said. “Sit on a cactus and spin for all I care. Transferogate’ll do its job wherever you are. Eventually, you might even get good enough to walk and move around while you’re breathing, like a semi-sentient being. Until then, it’s going to be hard to meet your quota on the days you’re doing chores and running errands for the OSS.”
So, I sat out in the distillery’s little garden and breathed. All day. The white and blue suns wandered across the sky. When I started to bake, I moved into the shade by the fence, a safe distance away from the shark guy.
After a while, the shark guy’s HUD beeped. He tapped the screen, read it, then left, so it must’ve been someone wanting him to do something.
That reminded me of Kest’s message from earlier.
I messed around until I found the messenger app. There were a bunch of old messages from people named stuff like Ril and Tober and Wash, probably all sent to whoever had died with this Winchester down in the Shut-Ins. Only Kest’s was recent, though, so I figured that was probably a good sign germ-wise.
I opened it and typed out a response—Are you guys all right?
While I was waiting, I checked my Spirit. It was up to 52, not very encouraging considering I needed eighteen hundred.
Kest must’ve been waiting for my message. Her reply pinged my Winchester right away.
Don’t worry about us. We’re not slaves to the OSS.
Indentured servant, I sent back, hoping she would read some joking sarcasm into it. I probably could’ve sent a smiley or something with it so she’d know I was kidding, but I’d never really liked emojis. They seemed lame and kind of stupid.
Holy crap, what was I saying? Who the heck cared about emojis when he was enslaved to a gang and probably never going to eat again? Maybe I had sunstroke or major brain damage from that fall off the fight cage.
To keep from thinking about how impossible the odds stacked against me were, I told her about cultivating Spirit for the OSS’s buyers.
Did they teach you how? she asked.
