by D. N. Bryn
Instead of stopping, she waves me toward her, her too-blue eyes obnoxiously wide. Her gaze burns.
I grab the links between us and haul them backward in retaliation.
Her chained ankle comes up, her torso slipping under the surface. She struggles back to her feet. “I’m just trying to—” She slips deeper into the water as she signs. Pausing, she steps onto a root. “Trying to save us! Rubem will be here any minute.”
“I didn’t need your saving.” My frustration crawls beneath my skin like a living thing. I cling to the powerless stones on my necklace to keep from falling prey to it. My excruciating want bundles back into something primal and innate. For this instant, I would trade all my future gambles just to have my one little well-worn ignit back. “I should never have freed you. I should have just gone after those damn ignits and left you for Rubem.” Her ignit hoard be damned, if I’m stuck with her for one more minute, I might just chew off my own fucking arm. The moment I think it, though, images of a huge pile of glowing stones assault me, begging for my attention.
“You greedy rock-headed—”
“Yeah, yeah I am!” My hands fly through the signs so quickly my fingers blur. “I’m greedy and pathetic and all those other elegant insults you’re so fond of. And I’m okay with that!” An old memory sears my heart, but the scales covering it are too thick for even that bitter knife to penetrate.
Her lips bunch. She looks away, only to recoil at the roar of a boat’s fan blasting to life nearby. “We really should go.”
“Fine. But if you pull on me—”
“I won’t if you don’t.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” She shoves her hair behind her ears and slides through the water, her chin held high as she works her way toward the land.
She swims like a boat human, all jerking arms and spinning legs that were trained for decks instead of rivers, and she fumbles when she climbs on the roots. Each of her motions contrasts pointedly with those of the new cartel leader, the serpentine stillness he exhibited so different from the others he works with. I shiver at all that he reminds me of, at the near vibration-free steps of the Murk warriors.
I duck under a root only for the chain to tug at my arm, forcing me to return to the path she took. I pull my torso over the wood and slip back into the water on the other side. The mangled ridges along my tail gleam grey and black against my natural brown.
The shitty boat human at the end of my chain trudges onto the riverbank. I follow, though I do so with the utmost care, scuffling away as much evidence of us as I can, until not even a fisher could tell we’d left the river here. Through the gaps in the branches behind us, I can just make out one of the Fang Cartel’s smaller fan boats poking long poles into the water near the tree line. But the way ahead looks clear, at least of people.
We work our way into the lush jungle, dodging branches and shoving aside ferns. Animals scatter out of our way. The plants rustle. My scales blend perfectly with the rich ground, but lugging my entire weight through the underbrush strains my muscles more than I care to admit.
Layers of drenched scarf stick to the boat human’s neck. Mud coats the bottoms of her pants, and the once billowing fabric now clings to her like a leech. An unexpected amount of strength trembles in the toned muscles of her arms and legs, and while her torso curves with less gusto than some humans, she’s filled out more than a boiuna’s tree-trunk figure. Her shirt cups the layer of chub on her belly. She tucks her arms over her chest. Her signs grow stunted. “It’s rude to stare.”
The realization makes me want to jerk my gaze away, but I force myself not to out of sheer spite. “Then, I’m rude.”
“But you won’t look me in the eyes.”
“Because you’re a nosey muck-face.”
I don’t tell her that eyes confuse me, dragging me in and shoving me out all at once, or that everyone seems to know the right times to meet each other’s gazes or glance away except me. I also don’t tell her that I’ve looked at hers more than anyone else’s in the last year, or that they’re haunting and terrible and almost, almost lovely—so much like sky-blue ignits. Would be lovely, anyway, if they weren’t hers.
Her: the person with a hoard of the precious glowing stones. I try to focus on that instead of my growing desire to rip off my own hand to stop the rattle of the chain between us. Ignits, all the ignits I could want. And I only have to force their location out of her. Ignits, ignits, ignits.
She kicks with her chained ankle, sending an obnoxious vibration through the links. “Since we’re stuck together, at least tell me your name. I have to know what to call you if I want to properly choose my insults.”
I roll my eyes so hard my pupils undulate, turning my vision blotchy for a moment.
Her throat vibrates. “Fine. I’ll go first. I’m—” She pounds a rhythm in the air: buh-bum, buh-bum, buh-bum. I almost decide to call her drums when she continues. “It sounds like the beginning of taunt and the funny ice stuff they transport here from the northern isles: Thais.” She makes the drumming motion again.
Boat humans are so dumb. “Boiuna can’t hear sounds like that, you sludge-brain. And we have scent names, we just convert them to words for you ridiculous species without noses.”
“What do you call this, then?” She shoves a finger at her nose.
“Facial ornamentation.”
A little vibration leaves her throat, a huff or a laugh or a growl, maybe. “You still haven’t given me your name.”
I could refuse, simply out of spite, but then she might just keep badgering me, and I need to conserve my energy for coercing the hoard’s location out of her. “It’s Bittersweet Earth, male, he.”
“You must smell like the taste of unsweetened chocolate! You’re a cacao bean.”
“I am not!”
“Cacao,” she repeats, lips curling.
I want to strangle her.
“Do I need to give you a gender and pronoun too?” Her shoulders bounce, and her face wrinkles a bit. “Because she’s fine, I guess, but I’m not really a girl. Or a woman. I’m just me.” She makes a new expression, and I wish she smelt stronger so I could tell what the fuck that look is supposed to mean.
Our conversation gives way to the rustle of birds through the leaf canopy and the slog of us pushing back the underbrush as we try to keep our chain from catching on roots. Tired patches of sunlight seep through the thick branches. Their languid touch makes me yearn to loop a few times around a tree and nap. My fingers linger more and more on my necklace stones, tracing their dull stagnant sides. Too stagnant; beautiful corpses, but dead rocks all the same. I’ll have to steal a new ignit as soon as possible.
A single ignit I can lose, though, just as easily as my last slipped from between my teeth. I glance at Thais. This far from the river, I bet I can masterfully torture a hoard location out of her without anyone hearing her scream. But as long as her jabbering continues, I should take advantage of it. Thais could have been lying to me back on the boat.
“It’s awfully convenient, having so many ignits just sitting around.” I give her my best impression of a smile.
She returns it with something that could only be a frown. “Not convenient for me. Without them, I’d be performing in the main square of the village just upstream from Rubem’s boats, and not drenched, stomping through the jungle, chained to a sulfurous chocolate bean.”
Sulfurous. “I told you, I smell like bittersweet earth.”
“Cacao.”
“Boat shit,” I shoot back, scowling.
“Pathetic boneless reptile.”
“Not a reptile, a mer.” I’m also not boneless. Or pathetic. Probably.
“A mer-snake. Sounds like a reptile to me.”
I roll my jaw around. Useless boat human. “So, your mother really created one—a hoard of ignits just like the rumors?”
“They’re mine now, technically,” Thais replies. “You know, she was a lot like you.”
“A greedy bottom-dwe
lling idiot?” I expect her to correct me.
Thais merely nods.
But if she equates greed and idiocy to her mother, and her mother collected ignits, then something doesn’t add up. “Why didn’t you give your mother’s hoard to the cartel if you’re not using them and you don’t even want them?”
Her throat vibrates with something almost like laughter, but too rough and tense. “I might have no use for the hoard, but those selfish cartel bastards drive up the price of the stones until they’re nearly unattainable, and the ones they sell go to weapons and machines that tear through the jungle like a tempest. Besides, anyone who wants ignits that much doesn’t deserve to have them. They’re only going to use them for evil.”
The selfish and the self-righteous, chained together by pure stupid fate. But her reply confirms two things: that Thais truly does have a hoard, somewhere, sparkling with ignits, and that she never planned on handing it over to scum like me. No surprises there.
I bare my teeth and lift my torso higher. The scarier and meaner I am, the sooner this will be over. “I guess my brand of evil will have to do, then.”
Thais stares at me. “What are you—”
I grab her shoulders and shove her against the nearest tree. Her throat vibrates, eyes wide and brow tight. She tries to slide from my grasp, but I wrap my tail around her legs, holding her in place. “I freed you from the cartel, so you’re going to lead me to your hoard.”
Despite all my threatening, the shaking mess that huddled before Rubem remains a distant memory. “Or what? You’ll eat me?”
I wish her muck-filled human nose could smell my stubbornness. “I can be just as ruthless as a cartel leader—more so, maybe. You think you’re strong, suddenly? You were quaking before him.”
Her raised chin barely wavers. “Rubem scares me because I’ll never give in to him. And I suspect the cartel and that northern woman he runs with won’t believe that until they’ve broken every one of my bones.”
“That’s going to be a lot of bones for me to break in their place.” I lean toward her, closing so much distance that my hands nearly brush hers as I sign. “I guess we’d better get started.”
A little shudder runs through her this time, but she steadies. “Then do it already.”
This close, I finally catch her scent: like the air after a heavy rain has cleansed the land, like fresh sharp nothingness, so subtle and empty the wood and the soil almost cover it. The smell matches her eyes. But it doesn’t matter what she looks or smells like, she’s a boat human, and one I’m going to tear apart, piece by piece, until she gives me her ignits.
Twisting my tail farther up her body, I wrap it around her arm instead, coiling until I feel the crook of her elbow go stiff. She draws in a sharp breath. I peel back my lips, every pointed tooth bared.
But as if the strength has gone out of it, my tail won’t tighten, won’t make the sharp snap it did with the pole back on the cartel boat. Instead, the muscles shake, a sharp tremble that rises all the way up to my shoulders and pulls at my chest, closing my lungs. I brace against it. I’ve killed boat humans before.
But they were all trying to kill me.
I barely make out Thais’s one-handed signs. “You can’t, can you?” She doesn’t smell surprised.
Thais may be annoying and self-righteous and demeaning enough to make me wish I could eat her. But words are hardly weapons, even when they sting, and that determination, that fire—it won’t come like this. She’s right: I can’t do it.
The admission leaches out the bulk of my willpower. I wheel away, letting my tail slump off Thais. A single slithering burst takes me to the end of our chain, though, dragging my arm back toward her. Fuck this.
Fuck all of this.
I can’t wait around for Thais to suddenly feel like a threat. I have to find a new ignit, soon. And for that, Thais must go. “I want this fucking chain off.”
“Something we actually agree about.” Her eyes close, and she relaxes against the tree I pressed her to. With the scent of her still prickling in my nose, I notice fresh hints of it in the air. I swear I pick out fear, but it hovers so close to something warm and bright that maybe I imagined it. “My cuff won’t come loose,” she continues, “but we might be able to pry the one on your arm open.”
I filter through the dirt for a rock long and sharp enough to do the trick. A bulky common thing comes loose, dull on two sides, but still the best the jungle seems willing to supply. I hand it over. It pains me to extend my clamped arm for Thais, to give her all the power after I failed to torture her.
She grabs the metal without touching me. Her mouth twists as she wedges the rock into the cracks of one of its notches and wiggles it. The clamp shifts, just a little, but it snaps back into place with enough force to shoot the rock away. The damn thing feels like a proper crossbow bolt when it hits my shoulder.
I pull my arms free of Thais to rub at the spot.
“Are you hurt?” She smells so rain cleaned it sears the inside of my nose.
“Of course not. I’m a boiuna, descendant of the great serpent, Boiacu.” It’s a name first given to us by terrified humans, but we embraced it for so long that it pushed out whatever we once called ourselves. “We’re not so feeble as you fleshy humans.”
I only notice there was tension in Thais’s expression once she relaxes it. “I was staying in the village just downstream from Rubem’s boats. There’s a mechanic’s shop. I bet they’d have the tools to break both our locks.”
I toss my arms into the air, nearly smacking a low-hanging branch in the process. “Perfect! They can serve me to Rubem for dinner.”
She straightens her shoulders like she might heave a spear into my chest. “I won’t sell you to them, Cacao. Unlike one member of this chain-ship, I’m a decent person. Whatever cruelty you think you’re capable of, I don’t have to respond in kind.”
“Fine, fine,” I sign, though I mean ugh and fuck. “Then we’ll sneak in after sunset. Just don’t cry when I betray you for less shitty boat filth.”
“You know, I don’t . . . I don’t think you . . .” But Thais’s hands falter.
What had she nearly said? I shove the curiosity away and redirect our course to the village, doing my best to ignore her. It becomes easier the longer we move. Parrots tear through the trees above us, shrieking with such power that my ridges tingle. A small snake skitters out of our path, and I glare at it, wishing my weighty mass could move that quickly on land. Eventually, Thais picks up a pair of sticks, drumming them in the air and swishing her feet as she walks, her hips rolling and her bare toes digging into the dirt.
The last of the evening sun catches on a pretty coppery stone that peeks through the clay-red dirt. I pause to pick it up.
Thais clambers to a halt, too, saying something in her vocal language, and finally drops her sticks to sign, “What’s that?”
I spit on the little rock, cleaning off the dirt until its rough sides gleam in circles of browned red, and grey. It lacks the glow and thrum of an ignit, but the sight of it still brings me a sliver of peace. I hold it up for Thais to see.
She stares at me. “A rock?”
“No, not just a rock. This is bauxite. Because it’s high in iron and aluminum, it’s called a lateritic bauxite, which are from porous rock layers buried beneath the soil. It probably came out of one of your boat-human mines up north, fell from a truck rumbling down a nearby road, and ended up here. So, no, not just a rock.” I poke my tongue at her, rolling my eyes until my vision twists about.
The soft rumble in her chest startles me. I yank my tongue back in. The smell of her amusement sticks to it, leaving a weirdly sweet taste.
I huff back into motion, rubbing my new stone. Rocks make sense. They don’t have expressions I can’t read, or ask questions I don’t want to answer, and they encourage my greed, every acquisition just as bright and wonderful as the last.
“Rocks…” Thais’s hands flutter. She shakes her head, her laughter still thick in
the air. “That’s why you wanted those ignits so badly.” Her brow shoots up as she continues, “You’ve failed at that before, too, haven’t you? Been caught by the cartel for it? Or the fishers? Is that why you panicked so much in the netting?”
“What?” I balk, almost dropping the rock. “No, that’s not—there was one time with the fishers, when I first moved to the rivers, but they never netted me. I’m not that much of a fool.” As I say it, my mangled scales twitch where the boat fan seared into them. Maybe I’m just a different type of fool. But I won’t tell her that. “The nets have always hurt, and things like them—rough tree bark, rotting things, tortoise shells—ever since I was born. I don’t know why. Everyone claims I’m being dramatic.” My gut twists, and I wish I could retract the signs. At least I have the pulse of the ignits to quell the pain. Usually.
Thais watches me with an expression so far out of my grasp that I finally have to look away. Rocks. They’re better than people.
The leftover light fades to grey as thick fog rolls toward us like a stirred riverbed. I know without a doubt that we’re near its source: my birthplace, the Murk. Its enveloping mask encases the world in a deadly stillness. Even the animals go quiet. Our movements become the only vibration but for the distant holler of a monkey. I latch and unlatch my jaw to keep from thinking about the mist too hard, and what else lies within the deep swamps where it originates.
The jungle gives way to a thin line of water-rotted mangroves. A few glowing patches pierce through the deep-grey veil beyond: lights shining from a pair of cartel boats, their orange beams cascading off the fog.
“Under the water,” I sign, “before they see us.”
Thais slips in first. The river pulls at me when I follow, tugging with a vengeance. Farther downstream, its vibrations tumble through the air, then pound into a flurry of ruckus.
I glare at Thais the same moment her eyes widen.
“Shit,” she signs, barely keeping above the surface. “We’re too far west. The river splits here. The far side widens to a gently flowing arc toward the town, and this side—”
