Skyglass: Chapter 10

PHOENIX

I loaded Moss’ astro-coffin into Yunayuna’s goat cart, fire still billowing beneath my skin. If you looked closely, its burbling rage could sometimes be seen bending along my musculature. It was just as virulent as when I’d first torn it free, but I’d learned quickly to warp it to my will–it was me now, utterly. I was still trapped in human flesh, would always be flesh–but now, once more and forever, ever more, I was my fireself.

In my rampage, I had burned four drinkups, three PI brothels, and one black market specialty shop that claimed to carry bottled sunlight (they were lying). None of them had been directly related to my father, except for a tendency to fetishize fire. But I figured that maybe a gigasweet flash-display of my rekindled powers might tempt him out of hiding–after all, with his chalky skin and flutter-lust, he was little more than a moth. I didn’t bother considering the other possibility: that he’d already fled earth. That I’d already lost my only chance. I didn’t need any extra rage.

“That it?” Sable asked, as I scrambled into the back of the cart and took a seat beside her, while Yunayuna climbed in front and murmured to the goats. “Or do you have another morbid oddity for us from Moss before we head back?”

“Nope. Just the creepy coffin.” I leaned back against a sack full of leaf mulch, high-strung, but enjoying the tension. After incinerating the third brothel, I’d been tempted to find ten more, but unfortunately, I had other projects besides arson on my agenda.

“So, what–you just want me to fix it up? You planning on sticking Moss in there permanently, so you can have the apartment all to yourself?”

“Not Moss,” I said. “Devin.”

Sadly, my admission didn’t faze her. She just tilted her head and said, “You wouldn’t kill Devin. Who would you ransack the boutiques with? His vacuum-frozen corpse?”

I wrinkled up my nose–this guitarist was too sharp. Not calm like Zinn, but unflappable. She took the terrible things I said like she took everything else: with a sour sort of bored cynicism.

“Fine,” I huffed. “It’s only temporary–I’m using it for your show at the Ventriloquist. Devin’s going to make his grand entry from outer space, ride the coffin in through the skylight airlock above the stage, then step out in all his poofy, bubble-dressy glory.”

“Devin is not wearing a bubble dress on stage,” Sable said, knife out and glitzy-green in the Gut’s dusken gloom. “Those things are disgusting, and huge. Devin and his dress would be the only things on stage. And what about this rotsucking coffin?” She thumped the muddy hulk riding with us in the goat cart. “You think a bubble dress is gonna fit in here?”

“He found a collapsible one,” I said, snickering at her flustered anger.

“Not happening.”

“Uh, yes it is–unless you want to be the one to break Devin’s poor, cultured heart?”

Sable groaned, and joined Yunayuna in front. I shrugged and stretched out on my back, across her vacated spot, swirling a tiny ball of flame around in my mouth. Sometimes I let it zoom around the back of the cart when the other two weren’t looking.

Back at their grounded spaceship, Sable took the coffin into her shop, while Yunayuna and I played with a pair of goat babies and studied the ship’s monstrous extent of junk. I rested my chin on top of the kid’s butting head and stuck out my bottom lip.

“So, you’re saying we’ve gotta clean all the piss outta there?”

Yuna smiled broadly. “Indeed. She’ll never reach the Ventriloquist if we don’t gut her first. However, I never asked you for help–not that I’d complain if you gave it. I was thinking of bribing Devin into helping–”

“Oh please, sweetling. I’ve seen Devin’s place–it looks like someone bombed a rainbow in there. Devin wouldn’t be cleaning your ship–he’d be instigating a junk-pilgrimage from your home to his.”

“The Pixilikker’s full of ancient artifacts, and none of them are neon,” Yunayuna said with a smile. “I doubt our treasure trove would be to Devin’s taste.”

I rolled my eyes. “Can’t I just rent a spaceship and save us all a piss-ton of time and broken spines?”

“I think you’re forgetting about Sable’s pride. And her knives. Anyway, the ship’s in need of a good cleaning–so you can either help me or watch me toil.”

I pouted. “Whatever. I’ll help–but I want something.”

Yunayuna raised a brow. “Oh? What’s that?”

“A kiss,” I said, leveling my gaze at her–and before I could even lean in and take one from her, she did it herself. Our mouth-crush was quick, no more than ten seconds–but they were a delicious, musky draw of her firm tongue, her teeth-graze, her taste of loam and mushroom and silvery fish flashing in an impossible, sunlit brook.

“There,” she said, pulling away. “Payment enough?”

“Oh, just about,” I replied, following her to the ship. “But never enough. I’m unquenchable. Will Sable be all knife-stabby and jealous?”

“No. We aren’t like that–but she might ask for a kiss of her own.”

“That would be sweet of her,” I said, meaning it. I let out a breath. “Also, thank you. To be true, this whole city gets me all gloomy sometimes. Before coming here, my life was basically a non-stop orgy, and now–ugh. I fuck on occasion, but mostly I’m fixated on that stupid, sexually squeamish bassist because I always get what I want, and he’s not giving it to me. Do you think he trained his plants to jerk him off?”

To my mild annoyance, she asked a question instead of answering mine. “Why do you sleep next door to Moss?”

“Because my bed’s there.”

One of her eyebrows went up. “Because you put your bed there.”

“Are you trying to tell me I want to sleep with Moss? ’Cause if so–ick.”

“No. I’m just trying to tell you that you’re letting people get to you, that you like them getting to you–and that it’s okay.”

She laughed then, and the sound melted on my tongue–but I still didn’t like how invasive she’d become. Was I really letting those gritty blobs of flesh I’d surrounded myself with become a replacement family? Nothing could replace my mother or my sisters. Nothing, ever.

“Come on,” I said, gripping her arm and staring her in the eyes again. “Let’s go clean.”

I poured a little smoke out of my nostrils before she could look away–but Yunayuna didn’t seem befuddled or rattled. Not one bit. She just moved closer and breathed it in.

***

“Help–HELP!”

Devin’s panicked wailing arrived an hour or two before midnight, just after we’d finished clearing out the contents of the ship’s final room.

“What is it, Devin?” I asked, hanging upside down through the ship’s belly-door.

Devin yelped and scrambled toward the ladder. “Phoenix! I’m so glad we found you. Where have you been? I was so worried, and then–then this happened, and now I’m even more worried, and just pissed, and oh, I am going to KILL him. Assuming he’s not already dead–”

“He isn’t dead,” Marko said, approaching from behind, head down. He gripped something hard in one hand, his voice anxious and desperate like he was trying to guard himself from implosion.

“What the everlasting piss is going on, you two?” Sable wormed around my head and tromped down the ladder. She reached up with one hand and smothered Devin’s frantic mouth; she pushed Marko’s unshaven chin up with a fist. I did a neat little flip and landed gracefully behind her.

“And why didn’t you call us first? It being so apparently urgent.”

“We tried,” Devin said. “You didn’t pick up. None of you.”

“Well, we were busy cleaning,” I told him.

“Out with it,” Sable hissed at Marko.

The orange-haired elf took in a shuddery breath and blew it out. “So–so Devin and I went to Moss’ place, to try and talk to him. Help him, you know? Only, I guess while I was waiting for Devin to come, he ran. Dunno where, but he left this behind.” Marko opened his clenched hand and showed us Moss’ com, all slick with nervous sweat.

I took it from him. “What, does it contain some bittersweet note admitting to all his faults, promising that we’ll never have to deal with them ever-ever again?”

Marko’s head jerked up. “No.”

“…Well, it’s in his blood, isn’t it?” I scoffed, looking around at everyone, even Yuna, crouched in the shadows overhead. “Come on, sweetlings–you’re all thinking it, right? I just happen to lack the social clemency to keep my mouth shut.”

Marko looked sick; Devin, however, grew serious and thoughtful. “He wouldn’t do that–trust me. He just…wouldn’t.” He grimaced then, tugging at the pink forelock that hung beside his left eye. “At least…not on purpose.”

Sable spat at our feet. “That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “Gods, that man is so stupid.”

Devin smiled bitterly. “Destructive tendencies. I know all about those.”

“Right, then. Where do you think he’s scurried off to?” I pitched my voice high and bright to trick them all, but it didn’t feel right. I wanted to roar and fire-raze the city until I found my mite-of-a-housemate, so I could drag him home and tell him how inconsiderate his little game of hide and seek was.

“Actually, I think I might know where he is,” Devin said slowly.

“The coffin?” I asked. “Because if so, he’s probably pretty pissed right now.”

“What coffin?”

“Guess he managed to hide that one from you,” I said wryly. “Where then, if not his stuffy space-sarcophagus?”

“The place that hurts the most.” Devin looked over his shoulder, an unusually forlorn expression taking his face as he frowned at the encroaching murk. “His childhood home.”

Proceed to Chapter 10, page 3–>