Death Cultivator 2 Read online

  The scythelike arm unhooked itself and carefully pulled back.

  I turned around. The mantis’s eyes were huge and yellow and made of four or five segments each like tectonic plates. With those and the mandibles, the dude looked more alien than even some of the weirdest aliens I’d seen over the past month. There was no indication of emotion or thought in his face, just this weird insectile blankness.

  His dirty cowboy hat had tipped a little to the side, and underneath, I could see what looked like a ragged edge to the chitin on the side of his head. Maybe Rali hadn’t been wrong about this dude having a bite out of his brain.

  “Get to the farthest train car possible from this one,” I told him, “and get off at the next stop, no matter where you were headed.” Then it occurred to me why this guy probably was one of the last passengers we’d seen. “Wait. How many other people on the train did you stick up before me?”

  “Six,” he said, in that flat voice.

  “How many of them are still alive?”

  “None.”

  With that many new corpses, the train should’ve been a swimming pool of Miasma, but I hadn’t noticed any. Even if I had missed it, Hungry Ghost should’ve started sucking it down.

  “Where are their bodies?” I asked.

  The praying mantis’s head rotated smoothly on its axis, and he pointed an arm at the windows. “Defenestrated.”

  “Then before you go, you can drop whatever you stole from them, too,” I said, nodding at the floor between us.

  The praying mantis pulled a leather messenger bag from over his shoulder and dropped it to the floor with a clank.

  “That is everything,” he said.

  “Get lost,” I said.

  He swayed as he headed for the door at the back of the train car. I didn’t let go of Dead Man’s Hand until the ginormous bug had disappeared through it.

  On my way into the bathroom, I grabbed the bag and hooked it over my shoulder.

  When I got back to our seats, I set the messenger bag on the table next to the last few bags of uninfused AlgaeFrize. Kest and Warcry stared at the leather bag, but Rali opened his eyes and looked up at me, his black eye-lace shifting from wide to thin and back. It seemed like a weirdly accusatory stare.

  I didn’t sit down, just stuck my hands in my pockets. “So I kind of stole this from a dude who stole it from a bunch of other passengers he killed before he tried to steal stuff from me.”

  “You did, yeah?” Warcry said like he didn’t believe me. “Where’d you stash this cove’s body?”

  “I didn’t kill him,” I said.

  “Sure you didn’t, Death cultivator,” the ginger sneered. “But here’s his stuff and here’s you, fine as you like.”

  I shifted my weight. “I just told him to drop whatever he’d stolen and get lost.”

  “I thought I tasted Miasma,” Rali said in a low voice. “Hake, you...didn’t kill him...did you?”

  “No!” I threw up my hands and dropped into my seat. “Geez, I wouldn’t kill a dude for his bag.”

  Warcry snorted. “What would you do it for, then, grav?”

  “He killed like six people before me,” I said. “If I’d let him get away with all this crap, it would’ve been like he wasn’t getting in trouble at all for what he did.”

  That didn’t stop Rali from staring at me some more. He was cool, but we didn’t always agree on stuff related to stealing from the dead, so it wasn’t a big surprise that we didn’t agree on stealing from a murderer.

  Kest, on the other hand, was already digging through the bag.

  “There’s some great stuff in here,” she said. “Some questionable stuff, too, but the valuables are top-tier.”

  She laid out a thin business-card-sized rectangle of pale metal, a handful of Spirit stones, some physical credit coins, a silk fan, and a chunk of meteorite in one pile, then a little cheesecloth bag and a stick of bamboo with the character for LUCK carved into it in another. Between them, she set a glass flask of clear liquid labeled Lost Mirror in another pile.

  “I’ve never heard of Lost Mirror elixir,” she said.

  “I like the name,” Rali said, tipping the flask back to get a better look. “It’s got all sorts of haunting connotations.”

  For a second, it looked like something moved inside the liquid, a flash of purple and white, but when my eyes tried to focus on it, there was nothing there.

  “We should get a distiller to identify that before we try to use it,” I said. I had spent most of the past month as an indentured servant for the OSS’s distiller in Ghost Town, and he’d kept all his poisons interspersed with his real and counterfeit elixirs. Even with Ki-sight, you couldn’t tell which was which. Only another distiller would be able to figure it out.

  “Wouldn’t open that on the train, neither.” Warcry tapped the silk fan. “It’s got a Wind Spirit construct on it. Probably something that blasts enemies back.”

  Kest picked up the metal business card and turned it over, studying both sides.

  “I would’ve thought you’d be more interested in the star iron, Kest,” Rali said.

  “Star iron is everywhere.” She squinted at the card. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen platinum in person. It has some sort of information on it, but it’s not a book. It looks like...”

  She frowned, then put the card up to her mouth and breathed on it. Thin script appeared etched in the metal surface, then disappeared as the condensation from her breath evaporated.

  “What did it say?” I asked, leaning in.

  “What I thought—‘Money in the bank,’” she said. “It’s a favor card. Probably from somebody powerful if it’s platinum.”

  Rali’s eyebrows jumped up. “That mantis killed somebody with seriously high connections. Maybe they were on their way to retrieve a favor from the owner. Or maybe they got the card in exchange for taking the fall for a higher-up off planet, and they were going to retrieve it once they’d paid the sentence for him.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. “What, is that just like an old sword legend you read?”

  “No, it’s like the gangster dramas,” he said. “Not as good, but still entertaining.”

  “And total nonsense,” Kest said.

  Rali chuckled. “Yeah, total nonsense, but it’s still fun to see what the Confederated planets think gangs are like. Personally, I think the Big Five has them written as propaganda to romanticize themselves, sort of like recruiting tools.”

  The train lurched. I grabbed the edge of the table to brace myself. The elixir flask slid off the corner of the table and smashed on the floor. A wisp of purple shimmered in the air before evaporating into nothingness.

  “Guess we don’t have to worry about what was inside it,” I said, raising my voice to be heard over the train’s screaming brakes.

  Rali shrugged. “Fate takes care of itself.”

  The car filled with heat and noise as we pulled into the second to last station on this line. Nobody was waiting on the platform to board.

  The doors on the train slid open, and I watched out the window for the praying mantis to come out. It took so long that I started to think he wasn’t getting off, but finally he swayed off the train and through the rickety screen door into the station. A little tension I hadn’t noticed before drained out of my shoulders and gut knowing he was out of the picture.

  Enemies who still live are not gone, only waiting, Hungry Ghost’s voice croaked in my head.

  I flinched. Usually, the little grinning skull stone couldn’t talk to me unless I was touching it, but it was still in my pocket.

  That guy wasn’t my enemy, I thought back to Hungry Ghost. Just some dick who wanted to rob me.

  Death cultivator does not know the definition of ‘enemy.’

  Was that a joke?

  Hungry Ghost went silent with a feeling like somebody putting a hand in your face and walking off.

  “Next stop, Bogland,” the conductor’s voice crackled through the speaker syst
em. “Stand clear of the closing doors.”

  The train wheezed back to life and crept out of the station, slowly getting back up to speed.

  “So, Death cultivator,” Rali said, surprising me by using the same address Hungry Ghost always used, “what would you like to do with your ill-gotten gains?”

  I shrugged. “Keep the Spirit stones, sell the rest? I don’t really need any of this stuff.”

  “Except the favor card,” Kest said, pushing it across the table in front of me. “That’s worth more than all of us combined. Don’t let it out of your sight until we know who issued it.”

  “If I’m hanging onto that, it’s just going in my pocket,” I told her.

  She blinked at me, then took the card back. “When you need it, it’ll be in the storage ring.”

  “I feel safer already,” I said. “If you guys want any of this stuff, you should take it. You can probably do something with the star iron meteorite, right, Kest?”

  “You can always do something with star iron,” she said, putting that in the storage ring, too. “For the rest, I can see whether Naph’s back on Van Diemann yet. He could meet us for a buy.” She looked at Warcry. “He could probably bring new components or even a replacement prosthetic for you.”

  “Oi, stumpy, in case you missed it, I ain’t the only one with a missing piece now, am I? You let me worry about getting around on what I got while you figure out the sound of one hand clapping.”

  Kest sent him a flat glare, then swiped her HUD screen a couple times and tapped.

  Canned applause erupted from the little speaker on the side.

  That caught me so off guard that I forgot to be ticked at Warcry for being a jerk about Kest’s arm and laughed. Surprisingly, Warcry was grinning, too.

  Kest raised her chin a little and tried not to look smug about winning that round.

  “So, what about the rest of it?” she asked.

  Warcry sat forward and scooped up the fan. “If nobody wants it, I’ll hang on to this.”

  “It really sets off your eyes,” I said.

  “Ah, piss off,” he said. “Anyway, ya never know when a Wind construct’ll come handy, do ya?”

  “Rali?” I asked.

  The heavy-set guy shook his head, flicking his long hair out of his face.

  “You know how I feel about material goods, Hake,” he said. “I’ve got a good walking stick and good friends. What more does a man need?”

  “Money for food,” Kest said.

  Rali shrugged. “My twin usually pays for that.”

  “A safe place to stay?” I suggested.

  “Safety’s an illusion.”

  “A bleedin’ challenge,” Warcry muttered, glaring down at the silk fan.

  Rali smiled. “You speak my language with alarming regularity, Warcry.”

  The ginger snorted and stuffed the fan into the cargo pocket of his pants.

  “Offer’s open, big man,” he said. “Anytime, any day. Name the terms of the fight, and I’ll be there.”

  Bogland Station

  WHILE KEST MESSAGED back and forth with her smuggling contact, Rali meditated, and Warcry watched fights on his HUD. I gave sleep another shot. Eventually, the rocking of the train and droning of the tracks knocked me out.

  I dreamed about Gramps sitting on the rusty trailer house steps, shivering. There was a blanket hanging off his shoulders, but you could see the dark red smears all over his shirt and pajama pants. Cops milled around, asking him questions, while a paramedic took his blood pressure. Gramps stared past them, answering absently. He was watching another paramedic at the end of our carport while she loaded a gurney with a body bag on it into the ambulance. The lights on top of the boxy vehicle flashed purple and white instead of blue and red.

  I lurched awake, my breath hung up in my chest. Rali and Kest were too focused on what they were doing to notice, but Warcry looked my way. Before he could say anything, I got up and headed toward the exit at the rear of the car. My throat hurt like I might start crying or screaming, and the bathroom seemed like a good place to hide until I got myself under control.

  In the dirty little cubicle, I braced my arms on the walls so the swaying of the bullet train wouldn’t knock me over. I glared into the green eyes in the tarnished square of mirror over the sink.

  “Get over it,” I told myself. “It was just a stupid dream.”

  Usually when I didn’t have a choice in something, I tried to shove it out of my brain and not think about it anymore. Crying over what you lost doesn’t bring it back. Even my dad had understood that, and he wasn’t some genius philosopher, just a loser drug dealer with a dead wife. I was stuck in this universe, so I shouldn’t be crying over losing Gramps. This wasn’t any different than when Mom OD’d or Dad got sent down for dealing. I had to keep moving forward and focusing on what was in front of me instead of thinking about stuff I could never get back. This was my life now. End of story.

  Big surprise, that pep talk didn’t make me feel better, but the train lurched unexpectedly and threw me against the far wall, which worked well enough as a distraction.

  Screeching and clacking filled the bathroom as the train put on the brakes.

  “Last stop,” came the conductor’s voice over the speaker system. “Bogland.”

  I glanced at the mirror one more time to make sure I looked normal, then headed back to our car.

  Rali had climbed into the window seat I’d been in, and he was staring out with a huge grin on his face. The lace in his eyes was so thick that they were almost black.

  “Hake, it’s raining!” he yelled when he saw me.

  Sure enough, big dark clouds had blocked out the day suns, and now that we were stopped, you could hear the downpour on the roof.

  Kest jumped up and grabbed my hand.

  “Come on, let’s go!” she said, pulling me down the aisle to the opening doors.

  As soon as we stepped onto the platform, the icy cold cloudburst drenched us. Kest giggled like a little kid and spun me around.

  “It’s the rainy season!” she yelled over the pounding of the rain on the station’s tin roof. “I can’t believe we got here during the rainy season! Isn’t this great?”

  I laughed. “Yeah. Great and wet.”

  Rali hopped out onto the platform behind us. He stuck his arms out wide and tipped his head back, trying to catch some of the droplets in his mouth.

  “Oh man,” he said, swiping wet hair out of his face. “You just can’t beat rain straight out of the sky.”

  Growing up in the Rust Flats around Ghost Town, they’d only seen a couple rains a year, so it was no wonder they were excited about it. I’d come from Missouri, where it rained pretty regularly, but after a month out in the desert with them, it was kind of nice to be standing out in the rain again.

  Warcry was the only one who looked like he wasn’t enjoying himself. He sheeted rainwater off his buzzed head.

  “Sure, it’s fun now,” he muttered, limping on his locked-up prosthetic to a bench under the station’s overhang. “Won’t be when we’re two days down the road and wishing our clothes would dry out already, will it?”

  “Can’t you just flame on and dry your clothes out?” I asked him.

  He stared at me for a second, mouth open. Then he snapped, “It don’t work like that.”

  Kest’s HUD buzzed, and she spent a second juggling it one-handed while she opened her message.

  “Naph can’t meet us out here. He’s not allowed in shared Eight-Legged Dragon-slash-Heavenly Contrail territory.” She lowered her HUD and turned to Warcry. “So that’s a no to an off-planet prosthetic. Let me overhaul your knee real quick—see if I can rig up something so the joint will move again—then we’ll get going.”

  With minimal grumbling, Warcry let her take his knee apart and put it back together.

  While they were doing that, Rali and I looked around Bogland Station. The bullet train’s tracks had been built up on a high trestle to keep it out of the water th
at stretched out in every direction, and the station was up on stilts at the edge of a cluster of raised shacks. Elevated boardwalks stretched between the houses so you could make your way around the little settlement without getting your feet wet.

  “Can you imagine,” Rali asked, looking out at the wetland settlement, “if you lived in a place where you had to build your house up off the ground because half the year it would flood?”

  “If you wanted to go for a swim, you could just hop off your front porch,” I said.

  Blue-white Metal Spirit strobed and crackled as Kest welded something. Rali and I both put a hand up in that direction to shield our eyes.

  “That’s how it’s supposed to be on Selk,” he said. “From the pictures you see, the planet’s mostly water.”

  Which explained why Selkens like him and Kest were amphibious.

  “How weird was it growing up on Van Diemann?” I asked him. “I mean, this place doesn’t exactly match your biology.”

  Rali shrugged. “If you’ve never had it, you can’t miss it.”

  “Think you guys’ll ever visit Selk?” I asked.

  “That’s a worry for someone who knows the future. If I end up there, whatever. If I don’t, also whatever.” He stuck a hand in the runoff from the roof, letting it splatter on his palm. “Kest won’t go to Selk, though. Not if she can help it.”

  I glanced back at the benches. “Why not?”

  “Too much chance of running into our dad,” he said.

  My eyebrows jumped up. “He’s there? From what you guys said, I figured he was still on Van Diemann somewhere.”

  Rali shook his head. “He went back when we were really young, took some kind of fealty oath or something that granted him a pardon. He said he’d send for me and Kest when he got there, but I guess that never panned out. Anyway, Kest took Mom’s side on the whole thing and got kind of hung up thinking of him as a traitor to the family. She says she wouldn’t have gone if Dad did send for her.”

  That I could understand, but it didn’t sound like Rali did.

  So I asked him, “What about you?”

  The big guy leaned on his walking stick. “I bear him no ill will. Some people think they have to play by certain sets of rules to get ahead in this universe. Kest thinks money and connections can save her. Dad thought an oath and a return to Selk could. They don’t see that it’s all ridiculous.”