Death Cultivator

by eden Hudson

  Running while packing someone on your shoulders isn’t easy, even when your muscles are reinforced. The dead weight bumps and shifts and messes with your balance. Plus, I kept bumping Rali with Warcry’s leg. But we made it off the main street to the wood houses, then the scavenged shacks.

  In the sky behind us, the blue-white light from Kest’s shield wall flashed twice, then shut off.

  “Spread out!” the Bailiff yelled. “Search the town! They’re around here somewhere!”

  Footsteps ran up on us, but when I looked over my free shoulder, I couldn’t see anyone.

  “Kest?” Rali hissed.

  “Right behind you,” she said. “I’m still invisible. Why did you guys bring him?”

  From the tone of her voice, I figured she meant Warcry.

  “They would’ve killed him,” I panted.

  “So?”

  Rali wheezed a laugh. “You’re showing a distinctly Cold Metal disregard for organic life, Kest.”

  “I’ve got a regard for life—our lives,” she argued a little breathlessly. “It doesn’t make sense for Hake to risk them on a jerk who was about to kill him five seconds ago.”

  I hit Hungry Ghost again to keep my speed and strength enhancements going at top level while my brain tried to wrestle out some kind of explanation about why I couldn’t just leave Warcry behind. The shouts of the hooligans egging me on to kill him rang in my head, mixed with the noise of Blaise’s buddies howling at him to kick my teeth in.

  “They’re out here!” a hooligan’s shout chased us into the flat empty dust land. “This way!’

  I looked over my shoulder to see how close he was, but almost tripped over my own two feet. Rali caught me, and with an extra burst of Spirit, I righted my balance, shrugging Warcry higher onto my shoulders.

  “See?” Kest insisted. “He’s a liability.”

  “We’re not leaving him,” I growled.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll figure something out. You just focus on running for the Shut-Ins.”

  “The what?” Rali and I both snapped at the same time.

  “We can’t go home,” Kest said. “We knew that when we went after Hake. Everyone in town knows what we look like and where we live. The Shut-Ins’re the only place they won’t follow us. Not while the night sun’s up.”

  “Because of chaos creatures,” I huffed, almost yelling. “Remember those?”

  “It’s only like an hour to blue sunrise,” she said. “That’s not long. We might be able to hold them off. Probably. We’re more likely to survive the chaos creatures than—”

  Brilliant yellow light sent our shadows stretching out in front of us. Mine, Warcry’s, and Rali’s, anyway. Kest’s didn’t show up.

  “The Shogun,” I panted.

  “Shut-Ins it is,” Rali said, an inexplicable edge of glee in his voice.

  “Pick up the pace,” Kest said, her voice dropping back. “I’ll slow them down.”

  Ceramic clunked behind me, then I heard her grunt. Something swished through the air.

  Whatever it was hit the ground behind us and shattered, detonating like an atom bomb. Orange light flickered against the Shogun’s yellow, and hot air thumped me in the back like a fist. On my shoulder, Warcry grunted unconsciously.

  Kest’s footsteps caught up to us. “That was lucky. For a second, I was worried I’d grabbed the lung poison jar and we were all going to die.”

  “Fortune’s on our side,” Rali said. “How else could all this have happened on the night the Shogun’s at his weakest? And after we found the ancient cultivator’s treasures?”

  “Less talking, more running,” I said, hitting the speed harder. If tonight was Takiru at his weakest, then I never wanted to see him at his best.

  The yellow glow from the Shogun’s light showed us the mouth of the Shut-Ins ahead. Down inside, it looked blacker than the center of the night sun.

  Pressure hit then, smashing down from above like a giant hand, so Takiru must’ve gotten in range. It wasn’t as powerful as when he’d been standing right beside me, but with the added weight, my legs folded.

  Warcry and I hit the dirt like two tons of bricks in a couple cheap plastic trash bags.

  Rali hadn’t gone down, but he had stopped running. He grabbed Warcry and pulled the redhead off my back.

  “Speaking of that Spirit Damper,” Rali said in a strained voice.

  “I don’t want to leave it,” Kest argued. “What if they steal my design?”

  She didn’t sound like she was struggling at all. Maybe since Shogun Takiru hadn’t seen her, he hadn’t known to use his pressure trick on her?

  “What if they kill us?” I forced out, trying to fight my way back to my feet.

  Kest growled in frustration. Metal scraped.

  “Brace yourselves,” she said. “You’re about to lose kishotenketsu.”

  That rectangular metal box Kest had been working on appeared in the dirt a few feet in front of me. The lid creaked open on the newly welded hinges.

  All at once, my Ki-strength and reinforcement disappeared. The healing burn in my OSS tattoo gave out. But the pressure was gone, too.

  I sucked in a huge, whooping lungful of air and stumbled to my feet.

  “How long will the effect last?” Rali asked, eyeing the approaching hooligans.

  “Given the Shogun’s Spirit Ranking, I’d calculate forty-nine seconds.” I couldn’t see Kest, but I could picture her staring down at her HUD. “But better plan for thirty to be on the safe side.”

  “G’off me,” Warcry groaned and shoved Rali away from him.

  I tried to grab Warcry’s arm and pull him up, but he knocked my hand away.

  “What’re you gonna do?” I snapped. “Hop to safety?”

  “I’ll bleedin’ crawl.”

  “Twenty seconds,” Kest warned.

  Rali’s walking stick sliced through the air and cracked Warcry upside the head. The douchebag’s eyes lost focus, and he went limp.

  My eyebrows shot up. “What the heck, dude? Nonviolent?”

  “Doesn’t count,” Rali said, hooking Warcry’s left arm over his shoulder. “Sometimes you’ve got to knock out a drowning man to get him to shore. Grab his other side and let’s go.”

  “Meet you at the bottom,” Kest said. “I’m going to go grab my Spirit Damper and throw a couple more jar bombs. Here, take this, Hake.” She grabbed my wrist and poked the storage ring into my palm. “The chain ladder’s inside, and maybe you can stick the jerk in the ring so you guys can get him down faster.”

  Her footsteps took off running back the way we’d come.

  I slipped on the thin silver band. “Can you put people in storage rings?”

  “Let’s find out.” Rali eased Warcry to the ground.

  Death Wish

  SHOGUN TAKIRU’S PRESSURE came back while we were on the ladder. We were climbing down, watching for chaos creatures, then suddenly the weight of a thousand suns was pushing down on me, and my grip on the chains slipped.

  I slid-bumped down a couple rungs until I got my forearm hooked in one. I held on for dear life.

  “You okay?” I yelled up to Rali, my voice cracking from the strain of holding on after almost falling to my death.

  “Spirit Damper must be off,” he called back.

  “He really likes that pressure trick.”

  “It’s a low-level Shogun thing. They love to show off their consciousness.”

  “Awesome,” I muttered.

  But if the Shogun and the OSS gangsters could use Spirit again, that meant we could, too. I unclawed one hand from the ladder and dug Hungry Ghost out of my pocket. All the Spirit I got from it, I sent to strengthen my muscles. Without the little bit I kept regulating my internal alchemy, the Miasma started freezing my tissues right away, but if I made it to the bottom without dying, then I could worry about repairing them.

  Rali and I inched down, slow and shaky. Sweat oozed out of me, making my grip slick. To make up for it, I hooked an arm around
every rung on the way down. That wore a sore spot in the crooks of my elbows, but it was better than falling.

  From up above, we could hear shouting, and then Shogun Takiru’s yellow light started getting closer and closer to the top of the ladder. I sped up as much as I could without falling. I didn’t want Rali to be stuck on this thing if they kicked the anchors down.

  A head poked out over the edge of the cliff. Not Takiru, because it wasn’t glowing yellow. With the way the shadows from the Shut-Ins seemed to swallow up light, and the weird illumination battle between the Shogun’s glow and the night sun’s black rays, I couldn’t see the face, but I heard the Bailiff chuckle.

  “You humans sure do love doing stuff the hard way, don’t you, Smart Boy?” He dropped a handful of pebbles on our heads. “Live the hard way, serve the hard way, die the hard way. It’d be a doozy of a laugh to hit you with a zap from the script remote right now.”

  A little sizzle of fear hit me in the chest, then I realized he would’ve done it before now if he could have. Something had happened—he must have dropped it or lost it in the run or something. Whatever it was, he didn’t have the remote anymore, or I would already be a splat on the shut-in floor.

  “It’s a damn waste of Mr. Champion, but even more of a waste of you. You’ve got that do-it-to-it attitude a real champ needs. With a little more polish, you could’ve won the Territorial for us. Still could. Come on back now and hand over the one-legger, and the honored Shogun’s willing to grant you forgiveness for everything you’ve done.”

  Sure. I remembered how cold-blooded murderers were definitely the forgiving type.

  “No, thanks,” I yelled up with all the breath I could manage.

  “Oh well,” the Bailiff said. “That’s humans for you. What do you say, gents? Had we ought to hang around and watch the chaos creatures eat din-din?”

  A couple guys laughed, but Shogun Takiru wasn’t one of them.

  “Fugi,” Shogun Takiru’s voice filled the shut-in even though he was hardly talking at normal volume, “shoot them.”

  “Yes, Shogun, sir.”

  If Rali had been behind me, I might’ve tried to stop and put one of my Death Metal shields up, but even that would only be a half-solution until my Spirit ran out. Since that wasn’t an option, I grabbed onto the outer chains of the ladder and started hop-rappelling down as fast as I could. I could hear Rali doing the same.

  Another head and shoulders poked out over the edge of the cliff, and I saw the hunched outline of the dude with the rifle arm aiming down at us.

  “Night Target,” the gunman said.

  Crap, crap, crap. I looked down to see if I could jump the rest of the way. Still at least fifty feet to go, which was a heck of a long way when you’re talking jumping off a ladder.

  Then the gunman let out a wordless shout. I glanced up in time to see him just barely catch himself from going over the edge.

  Chains jingled, and ceramic shattered. A loud hissing filled the air, then everybody up at the top of the Shut-Ins was choking and gagging.

  Kest’s lung poison jar.

  The pressure shoving us down dissipated. Another weight hit the ladder, and I felt a little of the tension in my shoulders ease out. Kest. We were all in the Shut-Ins. If we could make it to the bottom and survive until blue sunup, we were safe.

  With ten feet to go, I dropped off the ladder. Rali hopped down beside me a second later.

  Overhead, Kest’s movement made the chain ladder sway and slap against the rock.

  “Knock it down.” Shogun Takiru’s quiet voice echoed off the rock walls. It was a little hoarse, but not as close to dead as I’d kind of hoped. “Let the chaos creatures have them.”

  The ladder jangled a couple times, then suddenly went into freefall.

  Out of instinct, I scrambled back from the heavy chain.

  “Kest!” Rali yelled, searching the sky frantically, arms out like he would catch her.

  Except neither one of us knew where she was.

  My heart stopped. She couldn’t have been more than halfway down. I tried to listen for her, but she didn’t scream, and I couldn’t tell if I’d heard her hit the ground or not. The log chain slamming into the dirt was too loud.

  Rali turned in circles, arms out, yelling for his sister.

  When the last bit of chain smacked the ground, the OSS gangsters cheered and yelled down a bunch of trash talk.

  The Shogun’s yellow light started moving back toward Ghost Town.

  Rali sank to his knees, chest heaving, the lace in his eyes thinned out to nothing.

  “Y’all have a good one,” the Bailiff called down. “Tell them chaos creatures I said ‘enjoy.’”

  Then he was gone, too.

  I swallowed hard and looked at Rali. His breathing hitched and stuttered.

  “Kest?” he whispered.

  I dropped to my hands and knees and started feeling through the sand around the ladder. What if she’d smashed into the shut-in floor and gotten paralyzed and couldn’t talk? What if we never found her and she died like two feet from us, staring at us and unable to beg for help?

  “Kest?” Rali yelled, a ragged edge in his voice. “Please!”

  “Up here.” Her voice filtered down from somewhere up on the cliff. “Hang on.”

  Pebbles and dirt trickled down. Those thin chains jingled again, and I realized what she’d done. When they’d kicked down the ladder, Kest had shot out her pointed weights from her chain gauntlet. The head had buried itself in the cliff side and stopped her fall.

  A few minutes later, she thumped to the ground and let out a whooshing exhale.

  “That’s a lot harder than climbing down a ladder,” she said.

  She appeared next to us, picking hairpins out of her double buns.

  Rali scooped her into a huge hug. “Stop being so emotional. You were fine.”

  Kest and I both laughed. I kind of wanted to hug her, too, but that would’ve been weird since she wasn’t my sister.

  Also I was shaking a lot. Not just a little tremble in the hands this time, but my whole body was shaking so hard that I sat down in the sandy dirt and flopped onto my back. I laughed until my eyes were watering, then I finally calmed down.

  “What now?” I asked, sitting up. “Obviously we don’t want to be in the same place they left us in the morning.”

  Kest checked her HUD. “We scavenged this area a lot when we were kids, since it’s so close to town. From here, we need to head east. It’ll start to branch in about a quarter mile.”

  “Warcry,” I said, remembering. “Hopefully that jump down didn’t break his neck.”

  When I got the redhead out of the storage ring, he dropped onto the dirt and threw up.

  I grimaced and handed the ring back to Kest. “Good luck cleaning up the inside.”

  “What,” Warcry growled between retches, “the bollix was that?”

  “The ride of your life,” Rali said, setting Warcry’s prosthetic on the ground beside him out of reach of the spreading pool of vomit.

  Warcry wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “You want a laugh, fat boy, I’ll knock one down your gullet.”

  “Rali saved your life, jerkwad!” I snapped. Then I remembered the messages the Bailiff had read. “You got yourself kidnapped on purpose? Are you out of your mind? Do you know how many people are dead because of you?”

  “Six OSS, eleven Sword Wardens.” He sat back on his butt and grabbed the prosthetic. The knee joint was dented backward. “And not a one of ’em would give a bleedin’ piss if it was me or you, grav. Ain’t you got any brain at all? You shoulda come with instead of pissin’ all over me plan.”

  “How was I supposed to know you were escaping? And what about your script tattoo? They would’ve found you in no time, genius.”

  Warcry just shook his head and tried to bend the knee of the prosthetic back the right way over his shin. Something in the fake joint grated.

  Kest cringed.

  “Give me th
at!” She snatched the metal leg away from him and started unscrewing bolts. “Trying to force a locked-up joint...”

  “Oi, be careful with that!”

  Before he was finished yelling at her, she had the whole thing in pieces.

  “Kest, do you think that’s the best idea right now?” Rali asked, eyeing the shadows.

  I took the hint and stood up, looking for chaos creatures. “Yeah, if we need to make another run for it...”

  “He couldn’t run on it before,” Kest muttered. She started going through the components and blowing each one off. A tiny spring fell out of another piece and hit the sand.

  Warcry grabbed it. “Don’t lose any of those little bits!”

  Kest rolled her eyes. “If I drop something, I can just magnet it back.” She held her hand over the pile. A bunch of cogs and screws and stuff jumped up and clung to the bottom of her palm. “See?”

  “Some of them bits ain’t metal, though, are they,” he sneered.

  She ignored him. Deep red-orange light shined around her hands, and the air started to heat up. The dented piece of metal she was holding started to glow.

  A couple feet away, Rali held his walking stick in both hands like he might have to give someone a beatdown with it.

  “So nobody but me and Hake are worried about chaos creatures?” He shifted feet. “That’s great, guys. Because if I was someone else, I’d be concerned that the only flickering shadow I’ve seen so far ducked into that riverbrush over there and hasn’t come back out yet.”

  I followed his line of sight to a stand of those wispy trees. From behind me, Kest’s Hot Metal glow flared brighter.

  “Just have to reshape...” She let the thought trail off. There was a metallic clunk. “There.”

  I thought I saw something hairy twitch at the edge of my vision, but when I turned to look, it had disappeared.

  Rali moved up beside me so that we were both between the riverbrush and the others.

  “Kest.” I grabbed Hungry Ghost and filled my Spirit sea.

  “Almost done,” she said, fitting pieces back together.

  “Just make sure you got all the pieces you started with, yeah?” Warcry growled.