Soul Jar

  Contents

  Summary

  What will you do at the end of it?

  ONE: Carina

  TWO: Jubal

  THREE: Carina

  FOUR: Jubal

  FIVE: Carina

  SIX: Jubal

  SEVEN: Carina

  EIGHT: Jubal

  NINE: Carina

  TEN: Jubal

  ELEVEN: Carina

  TWELVE: Jubal

  THIRTEEN: Carina

  FOURTEEN: Jubal

  FIFTEEN: Carina

  SIXTEEN: Jubal

  SEVENTEEN: Carina

  EIGHTEEN: Jubal

  NINETEEN: Carina

  TWENTY: Jubal

  TWENTY-ONE: Carina

  TWENTY-TWO: Jubal

  TWENTY-THREE: Carina

  TWENTY-FOUR: Jubal

  TWENTY-FIVE: Carina

  TWENTY-SIX: Jubal

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Carina

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Jubal

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Summary

  The best thief in the history of the Revived Earth is on a literal deadline—find a cure for the plague or die—but when the universe drops the ultimate extortion fodder into his lap, what’s Jubal supposed to do, say no?

  Turns out Nick Beausoleil isn’t the perfect Guild knight in shining armor his fiancée thinks he is. Nickie-boy made a big mistake while Carina was in prison, and now he’s got a deep, dark secret he needs Jubal Van Zandt to help him cover up. The kind of deep, dark secret Jubal could use to destroy their relationship and disgrace the overly muscled meathead forever in Carina’s eyes.

  What will you do at the end of it?

  ONE:

  Carina

  Carina leaned over the VR console to get a better view of what her fiancé was doing to its inner workings. She didn’t know what had to be altered so the console would play a game as old as Tsunami Tsity, only that it had to do with recent advances in sensographics—things like smell and taste—and that Nick knew how to override their incompatibility.

  “How does it work?” she asked. “What do I do?”

  “Nervous?” Nick asked without looking up from his soldering.

  To Carina, the console looked like a long black coffin that had been shoved into Nick’s bedroom to await a funeral, which she thought probably revealed some level of anxiety she didn’t feel yet.

  “All of the infograms I could find on VR games acted like everybody already knows how to play them,” she said. “There weren’t any entry-level instructions.”

  “Don’t worry, babe, it’s not complicated. Once we calibrate it to you, it’ll all be intuitive. Your brain controls your motor function, just like in real life. The Synap-Tech just transfers what would be motion IRL to in-game motion.”

  Carina hmmed.

  Nick stopped soldering for a second and glanced up, probably to tease her. He knew she didn’t like the idea of any machine having access to her brain, and he never missed an opportunity to tell her how crazy that was. But before he could open his mouth, his pale gray eyes latched onto the deeply cut collar of her shirt, following its lines down to her cleavage.

  Carina knew she wasn’t beautiful. She’d lived with her own body too honestly for too long to believe a lie like the one Nick’s eyes were telling. Their shared past, their physical chemistry, their love and respect for one another—that was what Nick saw when he looked at her, not an objectively beautiful woman. Boobs, however, were one of those features that attracted straight men regardless of shared intimacy or the rest of the body’s overall appeal, and Carina wasn’t above using hers on Nick. His response was always gratifying.

  His gaze finally met hers.

  A guilty grin stretched across Nick’s face. “If you don’t want me looking, don’t bend over like that. I can see right down your shirt.”

  “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t,” she said. She moved her arms away from her sides and her breasts lowered an inch. “You think I just naturally hold my elbows like this?”

  He went back to soldering. “You’re sick.”

  She laughed and came around the console to sit on Nick’s bedmat next to him, leaning into his side and resting her head on his shoulder. Nick elbowed her a little to let her know that the physical contact had been received and was appreciated.

  Carina’s wristpiece beeped. It was an invoice from the garbage company she’d hired to remove the boxes from her family’s ancestral home while she was playing Tsunami Tsity. Since coming back from her last contract with Van Zandt, the rate of boxes full of junk appearing in her house had increased to the point where a few days without clearing them out might do serious structural damage. If his theory about the metaphorical nature of the boxes cluttering up her life was right, then she had gained emotional baggage instead of jettisoning it.

  She sent payment to the garbage company, marked their autoresponse thanking her for her payment as Read, then went back to watching Nick work.

  “How long do you think it’ll take to play?” she asked.

  Nick waved a thin curl of metal smoke away from the circuit board. “It’s hard to say. Five or six days, maybe, if you play straight through.”

  “How will I know if I’m doing the right thing?”

  “It’s not like the VRMMORPGs where you can just run off and explore forever; you won’t be online and everyone you run into will be an NPC. Story mode’ll keep you on track until you get to the end.”

  “NPC?”

  “Non-player character. Part of the game.”

  “Oh.” Carina leaned her head against Nick’s shoulder. “What if I have to go to the bathroom? Will it let me log out?”

  “It will, but you won’t need to,” he said. “If you have to go, just let it rip. The nanobots in the Geloam will take care of it.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”

  “You don’t think so when you’re using the mech suits. It’s the same technology.”

  “I do think so, I just don’t say anything.”

  Nick smirked. “You’re not going to be worrying about what’s going on with your body while you’re playing, babe.”

  “Because the machine won’t let me.”

  He stopped soldering long enough to kiss her on top of the head. “You’re so crazy.”

  “It’s a good time to attack someone,” she insisted. “When their mind is off in another world. If they can’t even come to in time to defend themselves—”

  “If somebody opens your console while you’re playing, the game shuts off. If somebody shoots the console, rounds up to fifty cal will bounce off. It’s a double hull poly-alloy casing.”

  Carina started to open her mouth, but Nick continued. “If somebody tries to flood the inside of the console with water, the nanobots will consume and disperse it, just like your own pee and poop. If somebody tries to set the console on fire, it’s flameproof. Have I forgotten any possible assassination scenarios?”

  “I was just pointing out its potential,” Carina said. “But that’s good to know in case I ever have to murder my fiancé.”

  Nick snorted. “I would murder you first. We both know I would.”

  She jabbed him in the gut with her elbow.

  “Easy! Hot soldering iron.”

  With a shrug, Carina let him go back to work. She was eager to get started. Van Zandt had hinted that there was something life-changing in this game, something that helped him sense danger before it happened. And when those corrupted creatures in the sunken city had attacked, Van Zandt had come back rather than leave her and Nick to die. At first, he’d claimed he was just after the ancient computers they had salvaged. Only after she called him on the lie had Van Zandt admitted that he
hadn’t wanted her to die and miss out on this game.

  The self-proclaimed greatest thief in the Revived Earth was trying to communicate something to her through Tsunami Tsity. Carina couldn’t explain why she was so desperate to connect with Van Zandt beyond natural human compassion, but it felt vital.

  “That should do it.” Nick slid the casing shut. “Let’s get it calibrated. Hop in.”

  “All right. Just a minute.” Carina messaged the thief in question to let him know that Nick had gotten the console to work with Tsunami Tsity.

  With that done, she stood and opened the lid, listening to its actuators wheeze. She threw one leg over the side. Strong fingers slid across the back of her pajama shorts and grazed the ticklish spot where her thigh connected to her butt.

  Carina whirled around and smacked Nick’s hand away.

  He held his palms out, grinning. “You looked like you needed a boost.”

  “You look like you need a right cross,” she said.

  “And end up spanking you as badly as I did the first time we sparred?”

  “I was six years old.”

  “I was, too. Why, was that supposed to be your excuse for sucking?” Nick smirked, but strain had crept into his teasing. Carina sensed the shift more than she heard it.

  She didn’t look down at Nick’s barbwire bracelet, but she felt it there. Fourteen inches of two-strand high-tensile steel, six sharp and evenly spaced barbs, one easily broken spot weld, and yet it hung there like a wall between them. Nick had forgotten he was wearing the bracelet while he was working on the console—Carina would’ve testified to that—but now that he didn’t have a task to focus on, it was demanding his attention again.

  She’d had to watch Nick wear that stupid thing before, wasting his beautiful brain on punishing himself for sins God had already forgiven, but this time was different. This time Nick wouldn’t tell her why he was wearing it. Every time she tried to talk to him about it, he refused. Once he’d even walked out.

  Carina was tempted to use her capacity for influencing people to persuade Nick to tell her about the bracelet, but that was dangerous territory. It would blur the line between Nick and Everyone Else, make him no different from any murderer, coworker, or double agent on the street. No, Nick was the one person she would always be completely straightforward with, even when it led to arguments a little maneuvering could’ve avoided. The occasional frustration kept their relationship grounded in reality, made the happy moments something she could trust.

  The silence had drawn out, Carina realized. It got away from her sometimes.

  She punched Nick in the bicep. “Kiss me, dummy.”

  He did.

  When Nick started to pull away, Carina threw her arms around his neck. His lips twisted into a smile against hers.

  “You’re the dummy,” he said, bumping her nose and forehead with his.

  Instead of a retort, Carina brushed her thumbnail across Nick’s bottom lip. It was the only place he was ticklish.

  “Don’t!” Nick jerked his head away and bit his lip. “Augh, you’re the worst!”

  “Yes, I am,” Carina agreed, pulling herself into the console and taking a seat.

  The patented Comfort Geloam filled in the space around her butt, back, and legs, flowing all the way up to the underside of her breasts.

  Van Zandt hadn’t gotten back to her yet, but who knew what he might be doing on a weekday morning. She sent one more message letting him know she was going in, then set her wristpiece to silent for everything but emergencies.

  She stared up at Nick for the space of a few heartbeats, noting again the strain. The tension was becoming visible now at the corners of his eyes and in the set of his shoulders.

  “Go find something to fix,” she said, feeling as though one of them were leaving on an active and she should be saying I love you instead of making pleas disguised as jokes. “Or rebuild. Whatever it is you mech heads do for fun.”

  “I’ve got plenty to keep me busy while you’re playing,” Nick said. For a second, Carina was sure he wanted to say something else, but he glanced down at that damn bracelet. “Have fun in TT, babe.”

  Carina nodded and lay back. The Comfort Geloam filled in the console’s empty space, flowing over her like a living blanket. Without thinking, she took a breath and closed her eyes before the gel closed over her face.

  According to Nick, the “patented” part of the console’s Comfort Geloam technology was its applied biometrics. The Geloam breathed with you, time-released nutritional supplements into your system, used Synap-Tech to move your in-game body as well as relay the appropriate sensations back to your real-world body, and protected you from smacking your face on the lid of the console while in the throes of a violent virtual battle.

  It also felt like walking face-first into a spider web. Carina wiped her hand across her face, trying to get it off, only to have the sensation flood back in as soon as she put her hand down.

  “You okay, babe?” Nick’s voice was muffled by the Geloam blanketing her ears.

  “Yeah.” She knew Nick would make fun of her if she said so, but she thought she could feel every single nanobot touching her scars. She didn’t know what the bots looked like, but she pictured billions of microscopic ticks, their tiny legs walking across her cheek. “Doesn’t it bother you to have this stuff touching your face while you play?”

  “Nah, a couple more seconds and you won’t even remember it’s there. I’m going to shut the lid now. Ready?”

  “Sure.”

  The actuators wheezed again and the last of the light disappeared from behind Carina’s eyelids.

  One of her mother’s bedtime stories came back to her—a little girl trapped inside an old First Earth icebox trying to claw her way out as the oxygen turned to CO2 and her hallucinations grew more and more terrifying.

  “It’s waiting for you to open your eyes.” Nick’s voice was even more muted with the lid shut. “Blink a couple of times.”

  Carina squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them wide. For an instant, her corneas felt cold and dry. Then warmth and wetness flooded back in. After a few blinks, the nanobots in the Geloam adjusted to her natural eye temperature and salination, and she was able to keep her eyes open comfortably.

  Soft aquamarine light crossed with brighter flashes of yellow lit up the dark, shifting and fluid like sunbeams shining underwater. But instead of the end of her nose and the interior of the console, Carina saw a title sequence.

  Tsunami Tsity

  by

  Psych Tryke

  The prickling itch in her scars was driving her insane. Out of habit, she tried to swipe the hair off her cheek, but her hair wasn’t touching it. The nanogel again. Carina lowered her arm back to her side. She had learned young never to scratch a patch of hypersensitive nerve endings. To compensate, she bit the inside of her cheek.

  A static screen appeared.

  Story Mode

  Tsunami Tsity Unbound

  Tsunami Tsity Live (No laptic connection detected.)

  Settings

  Credits

  Quit

  “How do I select Story Mode?” Carina asked.

  The arrow next to the first option flashed. The static screen faded to black.

  A razorblade appeared in the darkness, spinning on its end as if someone had flicked it. With the smallest hint of lag time, glints of aquamarine light flashed off of the blade’s shiny surface.

  Then a splash of blood.

  ***

  The world faded in, and Carina found herself staring up at the ceiling of her bedroom.

  Except it wasn’t her bedroom at the Xiao ancestral home, and it wasn’t Nick’s room in the Guild building. Everything in this room, from the bed frame to the dresser to the door, looked to have been salvaged from a First Earth city. She had never seen any of this before—she knew she hadn’t—but her mind was telling her that this had been her bedroom since the day she was born.

  A vertiginous spasm of ment
al rejection made Carina’s out-of-game body jerk.

  “Miyo?” her mother, a woman who did not sound at all like Sir Siobhan Xiao, the Deathwight, called down the hall. “Are you still in bed? It’s well past sunup!”

  Okay, so that was how the game worked. Superimposed base memory.

  “Miyo!”

  “Coming,” Carina called back in the petulant voice of a teenage girl—Miyo—and allowed the superimposed memory to overwhelm her. Miyo’s mother was Qiva, widely known as one of the most beautiful women in Tsunami Tsity, who still claimed she was only thirty-nine in spite of the fact that Miyo was seventeen and everyone knew Qiva hadn’t given birth until she was nearly at the end of childbearing years.

  Carina smiled and made a mental note to tell both Nick and Van Zandt that this was the same thing as cheating. Anybody could convince you that you’d heard a good story if all they had to do was inject the exposition straight into your brain.

  She sat up, dropping her legs over the side of the bed, then stopped.

  Nothing hurt. No stiffness or aches and pains from the day or week or battle before. She had never realized how accustomed she was to her body’s constant complaints. As a kid, she’d been eager to prove that she deserved her last name in spite of her lagging genetic upgrades. Sixteen-year-old Carina had never stopped to consider the toll that kind of grinding would take on her body as she aged. Being in the game was like being reborn. She flexed the leg she’d broken in Soam, then stood and rotated her torso from side to side, testing out the vertebrae that had been replaced. All as good as new.

  “Never thought I’d get to be a kid again.” It was strange to hear the falsely familiar voice speaking instead of her own, but Carina managed to avoid another spasm of rejection by mentally stepping around the idea of voices altogether. “I wonder how many chronically ill and paralyzed players get addicted to these games.”

  As if on cue, the real world chose that second to intrude in the form of a million prickly-footed nanoticks walking on her scars. Without even thinking about it, Carina reached up to swipe the hair off her cheek.

  Pain sliced across her nerve endings. Blood ran down her face and dripped onto her unrealistically skimpy nighty. Like ultra-sexy nightwear on a seventeen-year-old, the blood wasn’t quite true to life—a little too thick, a little too shiny.