Being a guest of Honor isn’t very different from being a guest of Privilege or a guest of Obsequiousness. It’s better than being a guest of Pain.
Chalcedony’s been couchsurfing in Conceptua since she lost her lease, or rather since the definition of “lease” blew out the window one breezy April day. It’s not so bad. She misses her privacy, but she gets to go through her hosts’ things when they’re not home.
Honor’s secrets are trite and disappointing: bribe money in the freezer, sexts from Hate. Chalcedony almost misses those drawers full of mousetraps, where Pain hid nothing at all.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The thing digging into his ribcage, Zach decides as he lies prone and aching, is a gun.
This knowledge sits there in his mind, unprocessed, a block shaped inappropriately for the available holes. A gun. A GUN gun.
Who on earth, he wonders, would be so irresponsible as to give him one of those?
The half-life of lidocaine in the body is roughly two hours. The pain of his burns is returning, but Zach gets the big black thing unholstered. He ejects the clip (full) and reslots it. He checks the slide.
Somebody taught him how to do that once.
There’s short-term and its 7±2 little cubbyholes (well, -2, honestly), and then there’s long-term and its swarming depths, its endless opportunities for recrimination. But in between lurks a zone of Heisenbergian instability, like the part of a drain one can reach but not see. It’s murky down there. You could as easily rake up a fistful of glass as a goldflake, or flail for an hour and find neither, and you never know when it’s going to get flushed.
And that’s where ideas go when you don’t write them down, Jake reminds himself, scowling at the stupid bus window.
The cat’s domain is overrun with invaders, but the parliament of her brain is in deadlock: she goes from resignation to panic and back again. Imelda, meanwhile, goes from the back of the couch to the arm of the recliner in one long flail-to-balance step. Shifting her weight forward causes the recliner to do what it does best, but if she goes up on tiptoe she can balance against the ceiling. This is allowed under the rules (no matter what Daran says). It’s not that the floor is made of lava; it’s that the air is full of joy.
“Behold,” says the man in the red cassock, whose name, we’ll find out eventually, is Sanguoît. “Your chance at freedom.”
Yael and Silhouine, dehooded, are busy blinking and making faces in the afternoon sun.
“I said behold!”
They behold it.
“Freedom,” notes Yael, “looks like a cave.”
“A cave wherein the last of the masters of the High Age hid his masterwork: the means to challenge the Iron Heart in its own–” (he continues in this vein for a while here) “–OUR FREEDOM.”
“Wait, whose?” says Silhouine. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.”
After that the cave seems like the safest option.
A typical candle emits light at a luminous intensity of about one candela, in every direction except down.
One can leave oneself a trail in wax, if one tilts the candle, or detect the presence and vector of microcurrents in the air. (It could also effect euthanasia, were one trapped and suffocating.) Ptarmigan is grateful for the candle: it serves as both canary and guardian.
These passages look all alike to her, but the wax trail wouldn’t lie. There are grues in here, somewhere very close. They’re playing a game with exactly one rule.
A typical candle can last for hours.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The California Civil War isn’t nearly as organized as the other one, but does have the advantage of nice weather and cell phone coverage. The Battle of Los Angeles isn’t as big as everyone sort of wants it to be; Nora’s squad spends most of the week doing mopup.
Which is why the ambush outside the big theater hits them so hard. Nora leaves bloody handprints on the sidewalk, but the med squad is snappy.
“Fucking idiotic,” she curses herself.
“Relax,” says one of them, “don’t you get a Purple Heart for this?”
“It sucks,” she winces, “just to be nominated.”
“So where am I in the initiative order now?” asks Bronwen, frowning, doing arithmetic.
“You pulled out the quorum call last round, so you moved down to fourth,” says Daffyd. “That means Knox has the floor.”
“Oh, okay,” says Knox. “I’m using an encounter power… uh, Force Recess.” Dice clatter on the board. “Hit! Seven votes!”
“Reduced to two,” smirks Daffyd from behind his screen, “they’ve got defection resist 5.”
“Aren’t you at least going to roll a morale check yet?” says Bronwen. “We outnumber them now, and–”
“No morale check.”
“Why not?”
“These guys,” says Daffyd, “fight to the death.”
They’re deep in the Uncanny Valley, deeper than any manned survey has plumbed, and the walls of their bathysphere are three feet thick and groaning. The spotlamp is low. Things that aren’t quite human flicker by, curious, providing their own illumination.
It is very cold.
“Are we even sure this thing has a bottom?” mutters Iger, glancing again and again at the pressure gauge on his dash.
“I keep telling you,” says Noam, “its depth is subjective.”
“I can’t breathe.” Iger struggles with straps. “If I just–”
“Don’t take off the mask!”
Iger stops, swallowing. Surely he still has a face.
“He’s going to offer you a last chance to make good on your debt,” the less burly of the guards mutters into Yael’s ear as, once again behooded and bedonkeyed, they jounce off to certain doom in the desert.
“What?” she snaps. It takes her a second to realize which language he’s speaking.
“Up to you if you want to take it. He’s planning on killing you even if you succeed, but it’ll be some time before I can get an extraction team out here, so–”
“Unfortunate plover?” says Yael, astonished, starting to catch up.
“It’s ‘sturdy protuberance’ now,” he grimaces.