Skyglass: Chapter 10

PHOENIX

Moss took a step toward me. “Can I talk to you?” he muttered. He glanced around at his friends, and added, “Alone.”

Sable pointed a knife at him. “Sure,” she said. “There’s a bathroom downstairs.”

He snarled in frustration, but jerked his head toward the stairwell. I followed with as many overdramatic sighs as I could muster.

“What’s wrong, sweetling? Are you distraught about your coffin? Or was Marko’s cock not good enough or big enough for you?”

He snorted. “Marko’s cock was not involved this morning–not that it’s any of your rotting business. And, believe it or not, we’re not crammed into this bathroom to talk about my coffin and how you had no right to take it away from me.” His voice dropped and he leaned in close, supporting himself on the sink. “We’re in here to talk about you.”

I blinked. He wanted to talk about me? How delightful and considerate of him! “Of course we are,” I said. “Do you want to sit down first? You’re looking a little starved and collapsible.”

Moss cursed, but took a seat on the toilet.

“Better,” I told him. “Now, I’m quite a broad topic of conversation, so what is it, exactly, you wanted to talk about?”

“I want to know what happened after you left the party. Because something obviously happened, right? You are the pyromaniac currently plaguing the city, right?”

A wicked grin barbed my mouth, and instead of answering with words, I blasted a rod of white fire at the shower faucet. It liquefied and steamed a red lahar down the side of the tub. Moss scrambled off the toilet seat, cursing, seeking safety in the corner between the wall and the shut door.

“That’s what happened,” I said. “I got my fireself back.”

He sagged. “I can see that,” he said weakly. “I mean, congratulations, I guess, but–how?”

“At the end of my visit with Zinn, we meditated and I…” I stumbled into silence, trying to queue up the right words. “It was like I re-accessed myself, like I sank deeper, or maybe it was sweetly opposite–maybe I surfaced. I don’t quite know, but I struck a spark onto my fireself and she caught.”

“A-and the fires you keep starting around the city…?”

“Are all well-deserved, don’t you worry your silly little head.” I softened my smile for him–to be true, I was almost honored that his curiosity extended to my fireself. “All my arson attacks have been for the greater good–also known as myself. I’m trying to tempt my father out of hiding.”

“Ah,” he said, just a little sigh of a sound.

I eyed him critically. “You aren’t really going to tell us you’re not hungry, are you?” I asked.

He dropped his head into his hands and scrunched them through his hair. “That was the plan. I’m not lying, Phoenix–I’m really not hungry.”

“So says your bitter, brittle brain. Your stomach says otherwise, I’m sure.”

“My stomach gets no say in the matter,” he muttered. He raised his head and looked at me with his bloodshot, shadow-rimmed eyes.

“I’m so messed up, Phoenix.” He stated it like fact–and to be fair, it was. “But I don’t want to be, and I don’t want to die, either. All I’ve ever wanted was stability, to know why–why they didn’t love me enough to stay, or at least take me with them. But everything I know I need to do to reach some sort of equilibrium seems to have only one end: me messed up and dead. I don’t know what’s good or right for myself anymore.”

I blinked, intrigued by the clarity of his confession. I poked him hard, but kindly.  “Let me be your guide, then,” I said. “Your cheerful little lantern.”

He groaned. “You’re more like a catapult flinging blazing, disembodied heads.”

I snickered; I rather like that description of myself. “If I’m too glorious to be a good role model for someone so dead-ended like you, what about Marko? He’s quite the failure, but he still manages to be chipper and amorous.”

Moss lifted and dropped his shoulders hopelessly.

“At the very least, sweetling, you’ve got to eat. You said you don’t want to die–that means stuffing things down your throat and swallowing. And I swear to all the goddesses of fire and fucking and fingering–if you don’t feed yourself, I’ll force pre-masticated food into your belly with my own bare hands.” I stroked his head lovingly.

“So,” I went on. “I’m going to take you upstairs and stick you in front of that table–and while you nibble away under the close supervision of your bandmates and your lover, I’m gonna go get your parents’ p-coms. Sound like a fair trade?”

“You’re–what?” he asked, jerking his head up to stare at me.

“If you promise to eat something, I promise to come back from the headquarters of the Bureau of Botanical Psychology with your parents’ personal communicators.”

He kept staring at me. “Promise?” he asked.

“Do you?”

“Y…yeah.”

“Then I promise, too,” I said.

***

I need something, I messaged to Zinn on my way to Ickdrizzle, the giant tree at the center of Raith. It was best known for its spectacular outdoor jail, but also happened to hold the headquarters of the BBP.

Oh? he texted back. I’m not sure you’re in a good place with me to be striking deals. You did see what your fire did to my apartment, right?

I rolled my eyes and came to a stop before Ickdrizzle’s base, craning my head back and back and back to take in its absurdly gigantic form. It was the core of the city and the green sky overhead–a massive trunk as thick as half a city block, rising up to the tippity-top levels of Raith. The trunk was a dense weaving of smaller trunks wended around bioplast windows and decks hung with mini-gardens, or cradling giant glass terrariums where Raith’s most dangerous criminals were jailed. I stood at the base of a set of crystalline-blue stairs fit between the largest of Ickdrizzle’s roots.

Fine, sweetling, I texted to Zinn. What can I do to make it up to you?

You could come fuck me.

A toothy smile split my mouth. A little busy now, I told him. Anyway, as much as I’d like to come over and spike myself on your surely glorious cock, I’m not sure that’s much of a trade. Considering how desperately I’ve been clamoring for your private bits.

Life’s not fair, he said, and I’m fine with that. What do you need?

Moss’ parents’ p-coms are in Ickdrizzle. Send me everything I need to get ahold of them.

You’re breaking into the BBP? For Moss? I’m a little proud of you, I must admit. All that meditation’s done you well. How do you plan on getting in?

I have my ways, I replied. I was already scrunched behind a root ball, stripping off my shirt and strappy pants. Send me what I need, and I’ll tell you all about it when I’ve got more clothing on–or less, if you prefer.

A moment later, Zinn’s com did a quaking little dance in my hand; I shuffled through the virtual files he’d sent, memorizing the maps and various codes I’d need to wheedle my way into all the proper places. Then I shifted into my catself, plucked up Zinn’s com with my mouth, and began my covert scramble up through Ickdrizzle’s crevices and cracks.

A third of the way up the trunk, I found just what I needed: a nasty little slit of a gutter. It was slimy, but perfectly cat-sized and currently water-free. I crept inside, lifting my paws as high as they would go in an attempt to avoid the gutter’s impressive accumulation of glop.

Zinn’s map took me to a dank storage room. It was as smelly and wet as an over-fermented pickle–and empty, too. Once I’d used my tiny paws to shut the door on the abandoned hallway beyond, I shifted into my human form.

I held Zinn’s com in my outstretched palm; it projected a mini 3D blueprint of the room with a tiny pulsing light in one corner. I turned toward the real corner and found a bioplast cabinet. On one of the cabinet’s many drawers, I saw a name that looked familiar: Wick. Moss’ last name, followed by two names I didn’t know: Edi and Sha.

Once I gave the drawer the code it asked for, I yanked it open. It held two sculpted p-coms: one a goat skull chipped from stone, the other a sleeping woman’s face. His mother? I wondered. Together, the p-coms were a mystifying pair of rustic little machines, each attached to knotted pieces of leather, but nonetheless, exactly what I’d come for.

As I looked around the room for anything else interesting to steal, I got a message from Zinn: Good job on getting inside. You can tell me later how you managed to scale Ickdrizzle–but in the meantime, I’d suggest running. You’ve been noticed.

A scruffy security feed eclipsed the message, showing me a grumpy-looking security guard striding down the hall, toward my storage room. I rolled my eyes, shifted feline again, and nosed my head through the leather nooses attached to the coms. I grabbed Zinn’s wooden cube in my mouth just as the door opened.

A beam surged from the guard’s p-com, bleeding a terrible, impenetrable white across my night vision. I couldn’t see anything, so I rushed the open door with instinctual guesswork, rebounded off the frame, and scrambled down the hall before he could realize that the trespassing cat was also a thief.

I forewent the map and leapt into the first ventilation shaft I could find, the guard’s light cutting white arcs behind me; a few paces down the shaft, I paused and looked over my shoulder. The glow of com light lit up his feet as he paused before the shaft. He kicked it once, muttered, “Rotting creature,” and left.

Without a map to guide me, or a human mouth or hands to message Zinn and bug him for updated directions, I decided down was my best option. So down I headed, until I reached a cavernous, billowing shaft, hanging roots and rhizomes shuddering in the sopping wind that tore through. I placed the three coms on the ground beside me, out of the way of my burn as I became human. For a moment I stood there, breathing in the smell of wood-rot and letting the air wrack me.

I glanced at the coms by my bare feet, and wondered if I’d done the right thing.

Obviously, I’d done what Moss wanted–but what Moss wanted, and what Moss needed, and what Moss thought he needed, were all different things. None of that was for me to figure out, though–that was his job.

I cackled into the wind and scalded the wall beside me with a sloppy burst of pink flame. As it died, I saw a blip in the darkness–at first, I thought it was a reflection of my fire. But it was looming closer, some sort of dry, brittle crackle of spidery light: a torch of bound lightening wrenching about in the shaft’s gale. I could barely make out the shadow of a hand gripping the base.

Time to go, I thought. I draped Edi and Sha Wick’s coms over my neck and skipped down the shaft, wind clawing my face and fire roaring in my belly.

Continued in Chapter 11.

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