“You’re right,” says Sara, tossing the hammer behind her. “I’m not going to hit you.”
“You could have saved us some time, dear,” says Nasser, regarding the ruins, “and me some money.”
“Hogy a mellény.”
István grins and leaves. Nasser frowns.
“I do speak a little Hungarian, you know,” he says, “but I fail to see what ‘vest’–”
“It’s time you knew how it feels,” she says, “to be the one manipulated.”
“We all manipulate each other, Sara,” he says, but with an unusual sobriety. “Every one of us.”
“Not every one,” says Sara.
Meanwhile, Zach shoots an eight-year-old.
The doctor’s mask is mouthless, beaked, its eyes covered by red goggles. It wears a broad black hat and has no skin visible under its leathers. It carries a stick.
Fairfax only sees the doctor in crowds, and usually from a distance. It (he?) isn’t a hallucination; Fairfax has asked, and other people see it, they just don’t seem to care. “SCA nerd,” they say. “Steampunk. Cosplayer.”
Fairfax isn’t sure how he knows the figure is a doctor, but he doesn’t think it’s the kind that treats people.
It’s the kind that tells everyone else when you’re going to die.
“We could double back–”
“Won’t he have posted guards or something?”
“If I were guarding a cave mouth in the middle of the desert…” says Yael, dubious.
“Ah,” says Silhouine.
“Water could be a problem, but–”
“I think I’m going in anyway.”
Yael looks at her with green eyes.
“What have I got in the city? Trouble and debt, fear and no prospects. I don’t know if he’s crazy, but there’s something in here. If we find it, it’s ours.”
“That may be,” says Yael.
“All right,” says Silhouine, and knocks the ancient chain off the tomb door with a rock.
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.