But Ernestine doesn’t really listen, which is why she hasn’t locked her wrist when she punches Iala’s mouth. The fight goes quickly floorwards, and ends more quickly still, as teachers wade into Iala’s piled-on entourage: clammers deep in shrieking surf. When they finish prying, everyone’s silent about who hit whom; but there are twenty-six vengeful eyes on one side of the hallway, and one hurt wrist on the other.
Proserpina hears only later, thirdhand. Leaving her dorm to investigate, she finds Iala in her way.
“I need you to teach us some things,” Iala says, fat-lipped, bright-eyed.
Acid, Annamarie decides eventually, slipped into her first beer of the evening. Or peyote or something. She’s never tried any of them on purpose.
“Are you okay?”
The boy with floppy hair eyeing her, whose pink shirt has begun to pulse and race in her vision, may or may not be the one who dosed her. Not that it would avail him much–in fact, it’s almost unfair to let him so gravely misunderstand the situation. She tries to warn him, as obliquely as she can manage.
“Everyone I touch will die,” she says.
“Everything I touch,” says Remy agreeably, “explodes.”
Jake shouldn’t have worn the attempt at a necklace, converted from one pair in a string of broken headphones, which effectively makes him look like he’s trying to DJ backwards. His pants do nothing to contradict this. He’s lost her in the thick blind dance crowd, which shortly squeezes him out like an oil blob in a novelty egg timer.
Out back on the patio they’re playing a different song, and their instruments are bottles hurled down and out toward the basketball court. “Break shit,” advises a Phi Tau named Ogre sagely, handing him an empty tallboy. Jake concurs, and obeys.
“Do you think it’s true?” asks Cote as the TV movie credits get squished sideways by an ad. “About the thousand paper cranes, and wishes?”
“Sure,” says Ballard, “and if you beat Tomb Raider ten times without dying you get to see her naked.”
“You think the whole notion exists just to screw with people? Why?”
Ballard shrugs. “Because people love cheat codes. Whether you’re trying to cheat death or Nintendo is just a matter of scale.”
Cote snuggles in closer. “You’re such an asshole. Why do I like you?”
“What,” he asks, “do you think I spent my wish on?”
The whole fuckbuddy thing didn’t work, Rich muses as he picks shards of heart from the porch mat, because neither of them really wanted it to. Distracted by the memory of her chest when she cried, he manages to jam one sliver deep in his palm.
It was an arrangement founded not on lust but on greed: he and Allany were perfectly capable of orgasms alone. They wanted the treasure map, the kernel hack, the shortcut to unearned intimacy. Cruelty turns out to be as quick a path as sex.
Rich tugs the sliver from his hand. It bleeds; he doesn’t.
“Ooah,” says Captain Van der Decken, pacing the poop deck, “it’s der doom what I feel upon me, ah, der crushing despair of immortality!”
“You’ve been doing it for like seventy years,” groans Longinus, and pauses to vomit. “I’m sixteen hundred and I still get seasick.”
The captain switches to his native tongue. Unfortunately, Longinus can pretty much comprehend it.
“I don’t care if this is the only ship we can both ride,” he growls at his fellow traveler, “it’s not worth the dinner show.”
Up in the crow’s nest, Ahasuerus manages to grin maddeningly right through his mouth harp solo.
The velcro elves clamber by night up Euler’s winter jackets and weave hair and dirt in among the nylon loops. It’s not even his hair, it’s hair from dogs or tweed or, once, threads of real corn silk. Sometimes it’s the exact color of hair that will make your girlfriend so angry she leaves.
Most have forgotten the old ways of assuaging the fair folk, but Euler remembers: a bowl of milk and a piece of chalk by the door, and a little dry bread in his pocket.
This completely fails to work on the velcro elves, because they are dicks.
See Me is a silver fish flitting through mangrove shallows. Sometimes he sees other places: the future, or the past, or old friends long gone. Ships skim. Dog Shouting screams. Ratio Tile and Reaching the West Reaches converse, watched by a little green man.
As his wrist heals, they wean him gently off the opium, and the dreams give way to the glowing braziers of the hospital cave. Finally, he finds himself fully awake. The Princess is there, in the darkness: her breath in his ear, her hand beneath the sheets.
“It’s good,” she whispers, “to see you fully functional again.”
It’s very difficult to be a node with more than two vertices in a Mexican standoff, but this is more or less the role for which he was born.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, Pistolero.” Rodrigo’s sweating but his hands don’t shake. “We can figure out how to split the loot, and I’ll lower my weapon, and so will Nahuel, Adelmo, Cai, Pichi and Huenu.”
“What about Luis?”
“I sort of hoped you hadn’t seen Luis,” Rodrigo admits.
“As if I can’t count hammers cocking,” snaps the Man Made of Guns, and shoots all ten of them at once.