Death Cultivator Read online

  “I promise I don’t know what you’re talking about. Is it magic?”

  She snorted. “There’s no such thing as magic.” Then her eyes got huge. “Why? Is there magic where you’re from?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” She went back to chopping at the trees. “Spirit here is like...like the energy that animates everything. If you think of your kishotenketsu like an engine, then Spirit’s the fuel that makes the engine run. You gather it, store it, use it up.”

  “So far, I’ve heard you guys mention Metal Spirit and Elemental Spirit. Are those the only types, or are there spirits for everything in the world? Tree spirit, water spirit, backpack spirit...”

  She ignored the lame joke and wiped some sweat away before it could run into her eyes. “There are a ton of different Spirit types, but they’re mostly just specialized categorizations of the supertypes—Elemental, Organic, Ordinal, Entropic, and Mortal. You can gather any Spirit that’s around, but your body has to convert it to your type before you can use it.”

  With another couple swings, Kest cut through the last of the trees, and we stepped out into a clearing in the shade of where cliffs came together. The sand there was rippled like an untouched river bottom, and some random junk had washed up there—an O-ring that looked like it had come out of an engine block, a broken mason jar, and one of those shiny chains they have on pens at the bank.

  Kest reached over her shoulder with the machete and stuffed it into her bag, then started picking up the junk.

  “Decent,” she said, “but not what we’re looking for.”

  Faded flood lines were worn into the rock of the cliff, most of them way over our heads. I craned my head back to follow the highest one.

  “How often does it flood down here?”

  “Not very, but you don’t want to be down here when it does,” Kest said, checking a map on her watch screen. “When it rains, this place fills up fast, and everything washes down to the corners of the Shut-Ins. There should be a pocket around here somewhere...”

  Trailing off, she leaned forward and peeked into the spot where the rock walls met like she was trying to peek around a blind corner.

  “Jackpot,” she said, rubbing her hands.

  The metal in her bag clanked as she crossed the sand and disappeared around a corner I hadn’t seen at first glance because of how well the colors of the walls matched each other. I followed her into a shallow pocket cave tucked back in the rock.

  The smell hit me first, a stank like old hamburger and scummy mud mixed together in a trash bag and left to bake in the sun for a week. I jerked the damp collar of my T-shirt up to cover my nose, but that didn’t help. The nastiness filtered right through the cotton.

  “Geez, what is—” I broke off when I saw Kest huddled down in the back, digging through a pile of old falling-apart clothes.

  Except it wasn’t just old clothes. There were rotting corpses inside the clothes, the bodies thrown on top of each other like dirty laundry. Some were human, some were alien, but they were all dead and in various stages of decay.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Salvaging. What does it look like?” She rolled a squishy body off the pile and started digging through its pockets. She came up with a set of spiked brass knuckles. “Nice. I thought this guy looked like a hooligan.”

  “He looks like roadkill that’s about to pop,” I said. “Do you want, like, a face-shield or something?”

  “He’s not bloated, just fat,” she said, poking his ballooned gut and making it slosh. “See? Not hard. The trip down the wash usually stabs holes in them somewhere along the way that lets the trapped gasses out. I almost never have one explode on me.”

  I backed up a couple steps. “Almost never isn’t never never.”

  She moved down to the dude’s feet and pulled at his boots. They came off with a slurp. From the looks of the slimy foot bones sticking out of his pants, he’d left most of the meat inside.

  “Gonna have to wash that out,” she muttered.

  I winced, but Kest didn’t even notice. She was too busy undoing a dead shark-looking guy’s gun belt. She slipped it out from under him and held it up, inspecting the holster.

  “Not bad. I wish the gun had washed up, too,” she said. “Looks like he had one of the plasma emitters. Those bring in real money.”

  “This is what you do?” I asked. “Search for dead bodies and take all their stuff?”

  “If it’s useable,” she said, shrugging.

  “I mean...Don’t you think it’s gross?”

  She craned her neck and looked at me like she didn’t understand the question.

  “Getting their fluids and stuff on you,” I clarified.

  “It washes off.”

  I nodded. “Rali was right, you really don’t care about social niceties.”

  “Don’t they have corpses where you come from?” She sounded kind of defensive.

  “Well, yeah, but we don’t touch them all over.”

  “Then how do you get their valuables off?”

  “I think people usually get buried with them. If they don’t, the mortician at the funeral home removes the valuables and gives them to the family.”

  She went back to digging through the shark guy’s pockets. “I thought you seemed like a rich kid.”

  My brain short-circuited at that. I spent so much time at school pushing back against jerkwads who called me poor trailer trash that I didn’t even know what to say to that.

  All I could say was, “Are you kidding me?”

  “Funerals are for rich people on foreign planets.” She opened the shark guy’s mouth, scanning his teeth. “Here, unless you’re a shogun, you get dumped. That’s how most of them end up in these washes. Although some probably get lost or trapped down in the Shut-Ins. You can wander a long time if you don’t have a map.” She dropped her voice and let out a low, “Yes!”

  She grabbed a pair of needlenose pliers from her bag, then reached them into the shark’s mouth.

  Phantom pain shot through my molars. “What are you doing?”

  Kest grimaced, twisting her arm back and forth like she was really fighting with something in there. A couple seconds later, it popped loose. She held up a gold tooth pinched in the pliers.

  “Buying my way off this trash planet to someplace rich,” she said, dropping the tooth into a smaller pocket on the side of her bag. “Somewhere they can afford funerals.”

  Chaos Creatures

  THANKFULLY, NONE OF the corpses Kest looted blew up on us. When she’d finally picked them over, I helped her carry the stuff out to the water’s edge, where we gave it all a good rinsing.

  “What about portals?” I asked, shaking some water off the gun belt. “Do you guys have those?”

  “You sound like Rali.” Kest took the belt and stuffed it into her bag of salvage. “He loves those old sword legends, too.”

  Even though I’d been trying not to get my hopes up, my stomach sank.

  “So, they’re not a real thing in this world?”

  She shook her head. “Theoretically, it should be possible for wormholes to exist, but experiments by the most powerful Celestial supertypes haven’t been able to produce any.”

  I took a long breath and blew it back out, staring down at my reflection in the water.

  “So, I’m stuck here.” I’d meant for it to come out as a question, but it didn’t.

  In the water, I saw Kest look at me. She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it, grabbed a gold chain she’d taken off one of the bodies, and sloshed it in the creek, breaking up the reflection.

  We rinsed the rest of the stuff without talking and stored it in her bag. Then we hacked our way back through the tangle of willows to Rali.

  He was sitting in the shade in the lotus position, meditating.

  “How was it?” He cracked an eyelid. “Juicy, right?”

  “I don’t hear you complaining when you’re buying spices,” Kest said.

&nb
sp; “I don’t hear you complaining when you’re eating stuff cooked with spices,” he said.

  It hadn’t exactly gotten dark while we were back in that corner, but the night sun was fully in the sky now, the whole orb and its bloody-orange halo. The blue sun was down, and the white was on the western horizon ready to drop. What the twins had said about chaos creatures being able to hunt freely when they day suns were down ran through my head again.

  I nodded at the sky. “Should we be worried about that?”

  “Worry is for people with too many worldly attachments,” Rali said. “But we should get out of the Shut-Ins. And running wouldn’t be the worst idea.”

  We took off jogging upstream, the twins leading the way. Rali started to fall behind, so Kest and I slowed down a little. Not too much, though. The white sun was sinking, and the shadows were starting to get long and turn a weird purple-orange.

  We ducked into a side canyon, then through a tunnel to another shut-in, which made me think of Kest’s warning that you could wander down here forever if you got lost. But Rali didn’t seem too concerned, and Kest checked her giant watch every few yards to give us directions.

  In my peripheral, I thought I saw something dark and thin scramble up the cliff face.

  “Don’t look!” Kest said. “Just keep running.”

  Once someone says, “don’t look,” you basically have to. I turned my head, searching for it. I almost saw it. It was just out of the corner of my vision—

  I tripped and went down.

  “I said not to look!” Kest snapped.

  She and Rali grabbed my arms, really hindering me more than they were helping me get back up.

  “The shadow things are just a diversion to slow you down,” Rali explained. “Mostly.”

  “Got it,” I said, stumbling back to my feet.

  This weird sprinkling, whispering sound blew through the shut-in in a steady rhythm. It took me a second to realize what it was. Sand. Something was kicking up shovelfuls of the stuff as it ran.

  Adrenaline shot through me, and my heart went into jackhammer mode.

  “Let’s go!” Kest laid on the speed.

  Rali and I sprinted after her. We turned one more time, up a narrow draw where the sky was just a crack in the darkness. Kest sprinted toward the rock wall. I didn’t see the chain ladder until she jumped on it and started climbing. It jingled and shook with her every move.

  Rali and I skidded to a stop beside it, panting and checking over our shoulders.

  “After you,” he said, forcing a shaky smile.

  The hiss of thrown sand was getting louder. Closer. Something dark and thin flickered along the waterline. I gulped down air and looked again—I couldn’t help it—but I didn’t see anything.

  “Go ahead,” I told Rali. “I’ll hold it off.”

  “Don’t even try.” He stepped onto the ladder and hauled himself up. “Just follow me as fast as you can.” He laughed. “Climb over me if you have to.”

  Something splashed in the creek, and the air temperature plummeted. Now it sounded like someone was pelting sand at a window, tiny pebbles and particles threatening to crack it.

  Kest had made it to the top.

  “White sun’s still on the horizon,” she yelled down, leaning over the edge on her stomach. A few rays of pale light silhouetted her from behind. “Once you get up here into the daylight, you should be safe.”

  I jumped on the ladder behind Rali and kept exactly one inch from bumping into his butt the whole way up. The flinging sand sounds stopped, but a new one started almost immediately. This one was like the sound you hear inside your head when you scratch your scalp. Kind of bristly.

  I had to look back. Just to see.

  A spindly leg disappeared under a ledge. The bristling stopped.

  “Holy crap.” I looked up at Rali, then back down. “Can you go any faster?”

  “I tried to let you go up first,” he panted.

  The bristling started up again, all around me this time, and shadows flickered along both sides of me.

  “Shut your eyes!” Kest yelled down.

  “Yeah, right!” I yelled back, trying to look directly at them. Wherever my eyes went, the sounds from that side stopped, but I wasn’t fast enough to keep them both from moving. “If I can keep watching them—”

  “Then they’ll get you from the other direction; those things’re just their shadows!” Kest let out a loud grunt, and when I looked up, she was hauling her brother onto solid ground. “Come on! Just concentrate on climbing. Everything else is a trap.”

  Rali pulled himself up over the edge.

  I still had five more rungs to go. My arms were shaking, and I felt like I was going to let go or slip, but I kept grabbing for the next one and pulling myself up.

  The bristling got louder.

  Kest and Rali both leaned over the edge and stretched an arm down to grab me. I wanted to look back so bad, but I was so close. Just three rungs now.

  It sounded like the bristling was right in my ear.

  Two rungs left.

  I felt something graze the left calf of my jeans.

  “Jump!” the twins both yelled.

  With my legs, I shoved off the rung as hard as I could and grabbed for their hands. I missed Kest, but Rali locked onto my wrist and started pulling. Kest scooted over beside him and grabbed on, too.

  I kicked and scraped at the cliff face with my sneakers, breaking off pieces of rock and sending them tumbling back down. I swear I heard some hit a hairy surface close behind me. Then my head popped up over the edge of the cliff and pale gray light hit my face. My chest grated over the uneven lip of rock, then my stomach, and finally with one last heave from the twins, my legs.

  Rali and Kest dropped into the sandy red dirt, but I kept moving. I scrambled away from the edge on my hands and knees, then stumbled up to my feet and ran. I didn’t slow down until there was fifty feet between me and that crack in the ground.

  Rali dusted himself off. “It’s okay, they don’t come out of the Shut-Ins.”

  “I’m good here,” I called back.

  Kest stood up and hefted her bag onto her shoulder. “It’s getting late. Time for us to head home.”

  Rali nudged her, then jerked his head at me.

  “Oh, right.” She turned to me. “Do you have somewhere to stay?”

  I shook my head. “But if you point me toward town, I can find a place.”

  “As much as I admire the self-sufficient sentiment and despise judging someone based on monetary systems,” Rali said, “I have to point out that you’re not going to find a place here unless you’re part of the local gang or have some hidden store of credits that I’m not seeing.”

  I tried to think of a way around that, but before I could come up with anything, Kest said, “You’d better stay with us.”

  I stuck my hands in my back pockets. I didn’t have any money or anything of value on me. They’d said they weren’t criminals or with one of the gangs, but I still didn’t like the idea of taking something for nothing. Especially from people who had to pull fillings out of dead bodies just to make ends meet.

  “Just for tonight,” I said. “I’ll pay you back somehow.”

  Rali laughed. “Hospitality is repaid in the acceptance, Hake. Pay up.”

  Ghost Town

  THE WINDING TRIP ACROSS the top of the Shut-Ins was nerve-wracking. I could feel stuff watching us from below, but I never saw anything directly. The shadows and flickers and weird noises kept up, but eventually I got so tired of trying to keep track of them that I started tuning them out. The twins seemed pretty exhausted, too. We didn’t talk much on the way.

  After a while, we left the dark ravines behind and started traveling across flat open ground. A little town full of squared-off false fronts and dusty streets appeared ahead. The shadow of a water tower poked up at the end of town.

  “Is this Dust Bowl?” I asked, nodding toward it.

  Kest shook her head. “Ghost Town. Dus
t Bowl’s half a day that way.”

  “You guys live in a ghost town?” I asked.

  “Nah, Ghost Town’s what everybody calls it,” Rali said. “The original builders were miners from back during the Outer Planet Rush, but they disappeared without a trace.”

  “That’s probably not true,” Kest said. “There probably was a trace, but the people who moved in afterward either ignored or scavenged the clues when Van Diemann started being used as a penal colony.”

  Rali wrinkled his nose. “That doesn’t make as good a story.”

  Kest shrugged. “Van Diemann Mining Company—the people who first colonized the planet—launched investigations, but never discovered what happened to their lost miners.”

  “Probably got eaten by chaos creatures,” I said. “Or creek carp.”

  Rali threw up his hands. “You’re as bad as Kest.”

  “I mean, your story fits the setting,” I said, looking at the false fronts and corrugated tin roofs.

  “Don’t patronize me,” he said.

  But I’d been serious. It was the way the shadows were stretching away from the last sliver of white sun and the wind was blowing up dust devils all over the place. No one was out in the dusty streets, and I couldn’t see lights in any of the windows. All it needed was some eerie music and a tumbleweed to roll through to be fully set up for filming a haunted Western.

  “Come on, you two story-ruiners,” Rali said.

  We followed him along the outskirts until we got to a rusty shipping container about half the size of the ones on Earth. There was a lean-to built against the side, open on the end facing us and closed in on the rest. Crude metal guttering ran around the edges and let out into a rain barrel next to the door.

  “Home sweet home,” Rali said.

  His sister grunted and headed for the shipping container.

  “Kest,” he said.

  “Fine. Social niceties.” She dropped her bag on the metal floor of the shipping container with a loud clank and leaned against the wall. “Go ahead.”

  Rali flicked his hair out of his face, then reached inside the lean-to and pulled out a tin cup. Bowing, he gestured to the rain barrel, then offered me the cup.