They Shall Breathe Ashes, the famous assassin, and her assistant Shelby are crashing a wedding. They is wearing a red carnation; Shelby has long sleeves. The people on the right think Shelby is They’s daughter (those on the left, her date).
“And how do you know Enrico?” says a curious gentleman with glasses and not enough hair.
“I’m going to kill him,” says They, and winks outrageously. The table loves it: a jealous ex!
“Isn’t he vegetarian?” says Shelby, in that lovely contralto voice.
“That’s right.”
“Then why are they serving Caesar salad?”
“It’s salad,” says the gentleman, a little confused.
Owlbears with machine guns! WHOOOR!
“What kind of roar is that?” pants Sandal as she slams the stairwell door; bullets rattle off the other side. “Are they trying to eat me or protest my choice in relationships?”
“Hopefully neither,” grunts Bud, hauling himself up the stairs and fishing something out of his shirt. Below, talons rip open the steel door. Sandal scrambles onto the roof.
“Okay!” she gasps. “Now what?” But Bud’s busy, blowing red-faced into a busted whistle.
“WHOOOR!” shriek the owlbears, piling out. Bud drops the whistle and grins. Sandal sees swooping shadows, sudden hope, looks up: orcabats.
Camellia’s new to the building, only six months, right? She insists as much in silence and closes the door behind her, trying not to wake the man asleep on his mattress in the living room. Weird. Not as weird as bumbling into a stranger’s apartment.
Next day she does it again, dammit, why does her key even open this door? He’s still there, black hair wild, legs in a bar of sunlight.
Camellia sits down beside him. No movement. She puts her hand on his chest, feels it rising, falling; she tells herself this isn’t creepy. His skin feels really good.
“Power?” he asks, judging the size of the empty room.
“Out,” she says, and flicks the lights to demonstrate. “Sorry. We’ll get that turned on very soon. And we have an excellent furniture rental service…”
Valentino stands in the middle of the carpet, hunching, hands in his pockets. He seems to have no intention of putting on a shirt.
“I know this isn’t ideal,” says Yelena. “The situation changed on short notice and we’re doing our best to–look. It’s hard to guess what you people want, sometimes.”
“What does any god want?” he asks.
“Power?” she guesses.
“Out,” he says.
No more walking the road or wandering the grounds: she has three rooms, six books, embroidery and a closet for privacy. The books have lessons. Gnomon’s always a few silent feet away.
Her mother wakes her in the morning and her father tucks her in at night, warm and solicitous. They don’t blame her. She’s a child! She had an ordeal, and what matters now is her safety.
But Nightjar remembers the terrible freedom of the balloon, vulgar conversations, the danger of his hand on her arm. Remembers being an uneasy peer. Remembers Killington’s hat falling, in the spray of black.
Now you can make chili in a pot on the stove in an hour, if you hate Jesus, but the proper way to do it is a slow cook, two hundred degrees all day. Benton can’t leave anything hot at home, though, he’s got a kid, and he can’t have his delicious chili unattended in his cubicle. Plus his wife just died. Anyway, he solves the problem.
One day Morocco collects five bucks from everybody and asks, “how’s it working out?”
Benton straightens with difficulty. “What?”
“The Crock Pot,” says Morocco, pointing headwards, “with the bungee cords?”
“It’s hot,” says Benton.
Sleipnir moves like nothing you’ve ever seen: neither horse nor centipede, he bunches and stretches in two rippling phases. A wave. An earthquake. And fast.
The good thing, of course, is while he’s getting all that horse up to speed a desperate stable boy can just about keep up. Ehrich pelts madly and snatches the bridle–there! He’s got it, but they’re on Bifröst now, slick as rain, and he’s sliding toward its fiery rails–
Sleipnir takes the bit in his teeth, jerks him up with one contemptuous toss of his head, and Ehrich is riding the horse of the gods.
Mocha’s got a two-ton hearse, which isn’t as big as you’re probably thinking but is the only one in town big enough to haul the hermetic casket of Long Jim the Sailor’s Friend. A speaker at his gravesite will play recorded clicks and whistles for visitors. People line the procession route for the hometown hero; children throw origami life preservers and cry.
But we were talking about the hearse.
“Why do you even have one this big?” asks Joule, black-suited in the passenger seat.
“Pair funerals,” says Mocha shortly, “were supposed to be huge,” and smokes a gray cigarette.
She’s already bound into her cryotube, jacketed and manacled, wearing a mesh mask: but when her mic clicks loudly on everybody jumps. Achene might be smiling.
“You can tuck your criminals away in space,” she murmurs, and it echoes through the hall. “You can exile us to Binary Five and pretend we never happened, and soon enough you’ll see it: Hobbes, Locke, Schmitt. Your foundation is murder. You’ll crumble without us. Welcome to nasty, brutish and short.”
Silence. They start to wheel her away; her tiniest gesture turns them back.
“Sorry,” she says dryly, “was I supposed to just recite ‘Invictus?'”