Skyglass: Chapter 13

PHOENIX

Yunayuna offered to guard father number two while the rest of us went party shopping, so I left the astro-coffin in the belly of the Pixilikker with the rest of Skyglass’ equipment. If that climactic show and father number two’s capture weren’t something to celebrate, then I didn’t know what the rot was.

Before heading out, I straddled the coffin and looked down at the rotsucker who’d pissed all over my existence. I’d had Sable install an extra-strength bioplast window in the lid during her fix-up, which was convenient now, because I could look down upon his evil visage. I licked the bioplast directly above his head. He opened his mouth and flicked his blistery tongue at me suggestively.

I sat back, arms folded. Part of me–the impulse part–wanted to gore my fingers straight through the bioplast, into his skull, so I could soften his brain and drain it out his ears.

But the core of me wouldn’t allow it. Didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. Not my cat-self, not my fire-self, not my stupid girl-self–not any of my selves. I didn’t want my revenge to rule me anymore, and I didn’t want that man to rule me anymore.

I mean, I knew he was still gonna die, but this way was slightly less…vengeful. That’s what I liked to think, at any rate.

“You coming?” Moss asked. He was standing by the entrance to the airtube, with a besotted or terrified Marko at his side; I could never tell the difference with that man.

“Everyone’s already gone to get the alcoholic stuff,” Moss went on. “So I guess it’s up to us to get the food.” He added the last bit on grudgingly–but at least he’d said it, period. The old Moss would have kept his mouth glued, sealed, stapled, and erased when it came to sustenance.

I swung down from the coffin. “Guess so. But first I’ve got another errand to run,” I said, patting my sister’s lantern. It just wasn’t doing her any justice. She was quite little–so small, in fact, that all I felt from her was the occasional blip or spark-burble–but still deserving of a far more beautiful carriage.

“Take good care of my rot-cocked progenitor,” I called to Yunayuna. She gave me a salute, hopped up on top of the coffin, and began spinning a basketful of goat-fluff into wool. I blew her a kiss, then dragged Moss and Marko through the airtube and back to Midmoon.

A thick crowd of poppers mixed with a murder tailed us as we wandered through an alley of glitzy shops–but at a distance, to my sweet relief. My earlier fireworks had apparently given them some common sense. They’d grow brave and stupid again soon, but for now, I was happy for the space.

I stopped at a shop, bedecked with a sign that read Artisan Pet-Cage Builder–Classy Homes for Carnivorous Pals.

“Wait, she’s a pet? I thought you were sisters,” Marko said, with the first hint of dryness I’d ever heard in his voice.

I gave Marko the nasty-eye nonetheless. “HA. Very funny.” I heaved a sigh. “They’ve got the proper materials and designers. That’s why we’re here.” I raised the lantern up to head-height and tickled the warm metal, whispering loudly, “He’s a bit of a fool, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Phoenix,” Moss said in his warning voice. I hissed and left him and Marko hacking and blundering their way through a cloud of smoke as I swept into the shop.

The interior was full of glittery white light, the sort you get when the sun dawns on fresh snowfall. Cages hung from every available bit of ceiling, and gold-leafed hamster tubes wound up and down the walls.

“You!” exclaimed the pet-cage builder when he popped out of the back. He wore a splendid set of copper petal-pants that matched the many lenses of his red digiscope, pushed up high on his forehead.

“Yes, me!” I enthused.

“I just finished watching the retro-feed from the Ventriloquist–that was your Blowup, wasn’t it? Wonderful, just stupendously wonderful. And that epilogue at the end–almost edged into the overdramatic side of double climactic, which I’m usually not a fan of, but you pulled it off quite nicely. Well done.”

I bowed. “Thanks, sweetling.”

The man settled himself. “So,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

I set the lantern on the counter and flipped back the hood. “I need a nice little house for this cute little thing. The house needs a navigational system, an anti-needle obsess-direct thrusterforth, and the ability to withstand the drop-dead-cold of space and stay toasty on the inside. Oh, and it has to fit just right. No bigger than my fist.” I held up my fist so he could see. “She likes being bug-snug. Also, also, I need it done by tomorrow morning.”

The man blinked. “Uh…”

I smiled, well aware that my teeth were the stunning white of micro-fine sugar. “Remember who you’re talking to? Also, my accounts are very substantial, especially after tonight. I’m sure you’ll manage.”

He heaved a sigh, but wrote me up an order. Next (and before the food-gathering), I stopped by a jeweler’s and convinced them to make me a tube-choker out of superglass, so I could keep my sister safe around my neck for the night instead of in some grungy fire-slave’s cage. I grinned as she wriggled around in the tube-choker, all gleeful and gleaming, then fit her around my throat, happy I’d done so well in pleasing her.

Back on the Pixilikker, Yunayuna was still spinning goat wool; everyone else was half-drunk. Moss pulled Marko back before he could make it to the drink table, murmuring something obviously sultry into the elf’s green-tipped ear, because Marko ducked his head and stayed far, far away from the alcohol for the rest of the night. I, too, stayed away from the bubbly deliciousness–I wanted to starve the fires in my belly, keep them sharp for my father’s send off–but was perfectly content to cheer on Sable as she won every drinking competition against Zinn.

A few hours into Skyglass’ celebration, everyone was sprawled around the astro-coffin, sipping the last drinks of the night. Devin rolled onto his back and chucked a rum-soaked Peep at me, then popped another into his mouth, pointing at me with squinty eyes.

“Your fault,” he said around the marshmallow goo.

“What is, sweetling?” I asked lazily.

“EVERYTHING.”

I thought for a moment, then decided he was right. “Well, I am the center of all the universes, everywhere and everytime.”

“Yeah! Buuuut, that’s not what I mean. Look at that.” He rolled onto his belly and jabbed a finger probably five times in Moss and Marko’s direction. They were cuddled up rather close at the far end of the coffin; Moss went red and flung eye-daggers at Devin.

“I’m a little drunk,” Sable said, “And Devin is very drunk, but I can verify that you’ve screwed everything up in a very pleasing manner.”

“Mm,” Zinn added, raising a supportive fist from his sloppy lap-sprawl across my legs.

“I hate each and every one of you,” Moss said after a long stretch of petulant silence, during which everyone stared at him expectantly.

“Speaking of hate.” I patted the coffin and rose to my feet. “If it’s all the same to you, I think it’s time I sent my mother her gift.”

“Cheers,” Zinn said, tossing back the rest of his drink as I screwed around with the coffin’s systems panel. I set its course for the sun, kept the oxygen generator on, and even gave him the tiniest bit of complimentary heat–not that he would need it once he reached his destination. I added a little message for any grave robbers who might stumble across it:

CAUTION. CONTENTS HIGHLY CONTAMINATED (EXPLOSIVE CORPSE; MAY CAUSE DESTRUCTION OF UNIVERSE). SET FOR SUN DISPOSAL.

It wasn’t a guarantee, but then again, whatever was?

I leaned over the coffin and put a finger against my sister in the glass tube around my neck. “Say goodbye to your icky daddy,” I told her, and made a face at father number two.

He reached up and smeared something white and sticky across the inside of the window. Ugh. No wonder he’d been so quiet and studied. Well, at least he’d be gone soon enough.

“Any last words?” I asked my friends as we shunted his coffin into the airlock.

“Nope,” Moss muttered.

“Good.” I removed my sister’s tube from around my neck. “You can hold this.”

“Uh,” he said, gingerly taking hold of my sister in her rounded tube of glass.

“I’ll be right back.” I hopped onto the coffin and rode it into the airlock.

Zinn stood calmly by, smiling a little–or was that a smirk I saw?–but Moss lurched forward. “Rotting piss, Phoenix, you can’t just–”

Marko caught him before he got squished by the closing airlock door. “She knows what she’s doing,” I heard Zinn say as the door closed. “And even if she doesn’t, it won’t kill her.”

Moss glared at me through the door, but stood by, clutching my sister as carefully as a human possibly could.

I sat cross-legged on the coffin and groaned as the outer door eked open, stiffening my face with the vacuum’s death-cold. It had been a long, long time since I’d first felt this chill, on my escape from father number two’s satellite. But that ship was nothing more than a stiff puddle in the Waste now, and soon my faux-father would be a sweltering lump of bone and gristle.

I glanced back as we slid into space and caught a glimpse of my sister’s shine. I turned back toward the void, pensive now.

Sister-eating. Could she really free me? I did still have the opportunity waiting for me back in the Pixilikker, all snuggled up in Moss’s arms, but the idea of it made me want to vomit up my non-existent organs. Father number two had probably been lying, anyway, trying to trick me into actualizing some kind of fetish of his–pyromaniacal cannibalism probably got him hard. I mean, if a coffin could do it, why not sister-gnawing-on-sister?

What scared me was all the what ifs the opportunity had spawned. Like: what if I’d been given the opportunity to eat her years ago, when I’d been more raw and angry, desperate and sharp? Now the idea of eating my sister made me want to destroy things, but was that the weak compassionate bits I’d overdeveloped in this human body? Had I gone soft? Was I less fire now? Living on the sun had been a cyclic streak of sex and heat-blare–which meant consumption, and ending and beginning, and ending again, but always always with the possibility of beginning again. Eating each other (in all ways, sexy and otherwise) had been normal–but it hadn’t been death, because on the sun, death wasn’t something you knew.

And maybe that was what got me: I wasn’t on the sun. I had to play by new rules. I had to bend myself to be myself, because no matter how hard I wished it, I was never going home. Eating my sister and erasing her forever wasn’t worth it, even if he’d been telling the truth and I had another chance at the endless fiery tumbling of home; my desperate need to satiate my fire-self couldn’t justify ending her and betraying sisterhood. So my options were not in a million heat-delirious lifetimes and never never never. Done. I was no longer fire, and certainly not ever human–whatever it was that I was, I had to cleave to ride into the future, no matter what.

I stood on the gliding coffin for a moment more–but I was already bored, so I mouthed a sniggering good luck to my sun-bound father, kicked off, and drifted shipward. I didn’t look back once.

When I reached the airlock, I pounded on the door, and grinned at Moss’s eye-roll of relief as I clambered through the airlock.

“Anything drinkable left?” I asked once inside, reclaiming my sister and settling her back around my neck. With all that chilly business done, I was ready for something ticklish to warm my gut.

Zinn tossed me a full bottle of wine, the darkest red I’d ever seen. “Saved this for you,” he said. “I figured you might want something after all that bloody soul-bureaucracy.”

I popped the top and slugged down half the bottle in a single gulp. Delightful! Even if I couldn’t get drunk. I leaned in close and asked him, “Is this what you drank after your old day job?”

“Mmm, no,” he said. “I’ve always been a tea sort of creature.”

He said nothing more, so I grumbled at his usual mysterious self. I started on the second half of the bottle, but spit it back out, choking on wine and laughter as I caught sight of Moss and Marko.

“Rotting piss, you two,” I said.

They were talking in low voices on the other side of the room, their shoulders magnetically close. Marko was against the food table, gripping it very hard as Moss leaned into him. He stared, captivated, as the drummer fiddled nervously with the hem of his shirt.

“Does death turn you on, dearest housemate?” I called out to Moss innocently.

“Shut up, Phoenix,” he snapped. But he still murmured something to Marko and tugged him away by the hand.

I took a swig from my bottle as they left, and wondered if anyone would take a bet on whether or not those two would actually fuck.

Concluded in Chapter 14.

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