Skyglass: Chapter 7

PHOENIX

“Stop wiggling, Devin!”

The little singer stuck out his tongue (stained hyperglow purple by the candy we’d been sharing), but managed to calm himself long enough to stop dancing from foot to foot. I finished painting his eyes to match the billowy anti-g dress he was wearing, cut from cloth dyed to look like the Orion nebula. While the rest of the band did a last minute senso-check–for both the sound, and all the other sensory input my Blowup would be feeding to the crowd–I made sure Devin was perfectly primped.

I flicked him on the nose. “There.” I stood back so he could look at himself.

The dressing room’s soul-paint morphed itself into a mirror image of the singer. He eyeballed himself for a moment or two, smiling all the while; we’d fluffed up his hair, and temporarily removed his usual black-and-pink streaks, so it was all a sugary white compliment to the rest of his darkly intense galactic garb.

I handed him a box of Peeps from the stack Yunayuna had dropped off earlier. “That it, you devilish sugar-snogger?”

“Yup. What about you? Are you really wearing your hood again? Urgh.” He grimaced. “I don’t get why you always insist on hiding away in that porta-cave–you’re so good at getting dressed. Boo, I say. BOO.”

“But I gotta be behind the scenes tonight, right, sweetling?”

He heaved a deep breath in, let it out. “I guess,” he complained. “And that story of yours had better have a happy ending, otherwise I’ll sic my army of animatronic Peeps on you and then you’ll be sorry.” Devin sat on the ground and cinched a pair of small stilts onto his feet. They didn’t look manufactured, or even handmade–it was more like they’d grown straight out of the earth, an artful twining of lapis lazuli roots. He was still shorter than me with them on, but they put a certain grace into his step and eradicated the bounce.

As he stood, Devin’s face went somber. I twisted my mouth up and to the side, curious to see what he would do next–I hadn’t forgotten the night he’d broken my skylight.

“How’s Moss?” he asked.

I shocked myself by pausing and thinking about my words before answering. How was Moss? He’d been avoiding me the past few days, hiding in his room, door locked–probably because he didn’t feel like vomiting out his secrets. I had a talent for getting people to do that.

“Mopey,” I said. “Something happened between him and Marko, but that’s all I’ve managed to get out of him. He’s been sleeping a lot, which means he’s hiding from something.”

The singer smiled a little, then shook his head. “I was wondering,” he said. “Moss doesn’t like fructo-glitter and romance, or anything like that ever, but he’s always had a soft spot for big, warm things. In the past that’s always meant blankets, but Marko’s a good substitute. Guess I’m not too surprised to hear he’s the cause for Moss’s probably illegitimate sulking.”

“Yeah, well–whatever it is, it’s annoying. Brooding is boring.”

Devin snickered, then grabbed me in a sneaky tackle-hug. I licked his cheek in appreciation; living with Moss had left me starved for physical friendliness, especially since Zinn was such a prudish pisshead, and my father hunt had chomped up any excess sexy time I might have found elsewhere. I’d have to do something about that–maybe Devin would be interested. He was certainly cute enough. I’d have to bug him about it sometime.

After rubbing his sticky cheek against my own, he slipped away. “Thanks for taking over Moss’ apartment. He’s still a little mopey for my tastes, but I think you’re making him better.” He smiled at me, then twirled once to let his dress writhe about his tiny form, flinging the violet lucence of his jump-inked skin across the room. Then he ducked out the door and headed for the stage.

I was just buckling on my hood when Zinn peeked his head in.

“I’m never getting my com back, am I?”

I rolled the wooden square across the knuckles of my right hand. “Nope,” I said, then raised an eyebrow. “Not unless you wanna make a trade.”

“Trade?” he asked, fingers gouging out something inaudible and menacing on the bass slung round his neck. “Like this?” He leaned forward, shut his eyes, and ghosted his mouth across mine.

My shock lasted maybe two seconds–because obviously I’d known this was going to happen at some point–then my eyes slunk to a pleasant half-lidded position and I reveled in Zinn’s light, sneak-attack kiss. Yessss. This was what I’d been craving: heat, and the brittle, fracturing tension of single moments piling up and breaking all over each other… And then, of course, Zinn had to go and ruin said moments by pulling back far too soon.

“Barely worth it,” I said to Zinn, but pecked his lips once more before he was out of reach.

He looked at me–his face almost silly in its solemnity–then shrugged and headed for the stage.

Hmph. I liked kisses all right, but at the end of the day, they were little more than croutons, garnishes–all crunch and no content. Still, it was contact, so I flashed myself a grin in the soul-paint mirror, and left the changing room, giddiness for the impending show building in my belly.

I hid myself in the folds of gauzy curtains behind Moss. The venue’s low ceiling stretched overhead in a shallow dome of glitzy black bioplast. The room was small, but full. I accessed the Blowup I’d finished only moments before painting Devin’s face, hit play, then transmit. In the bottom corner of Zinn’s com was a blinking Q. Mr. Quist, Sable’s…friend, and the owner of the Ventriloquist, had tuned in. I grinned in satisfaction, always glad for an audience, and told Moss that I’d kill him if he fainted again.

“No fainting,” he promised in a drawl, and then his monitors started thrumming. Zinn’s bass growled out the lowest note I’d ever heard, so low that I was lost for a moment in sonic vertigo–the universe consisted of one sound, and there was nothing else–until Sable cut on stage with a vixen scream, her fingers ripping across the neck of her guitar, matched in pace only by Moss fleetly kicking his pedals.

A seed of sweet light materialized over the crowd, dew spritzing from its core and expanding into a night sky that plastered itself across the venue’s ceiling. The girl with plum breasts and her leashed man who wasn’t really a man–just a thing made for sex–dashed together through the sky. As their chase began, Devin tore on stage, singing of cosmic pilgrims and hope.

 

SKYGLASS_tastyPI.bup

The Pleasure Intelligence’s collar strains against his throat. It’s rubbed away his skin in places, revealing not blood, but the gleam of machine-flesh. Behind the man, his leash stretches back into the dark tunnel. A glow the color of dewy plums approaches, winding excess leash around her wrists as it slackens, as she draws closer.

The PI is weak from the hunt, his breath pants out.

(Devin crooned a breathy singsong.)

The girl reaches him, wraps her hands around the collar around his throat; when they touch, the tunnel collapses, the leash dissolves…

SCENE CHANGE

Instead of a leash, there’s a tree made of resinous starlight. Red syrupy sap runs in rivulets down its glassy bark. The girl stalks circles ’round the tree. Trapped at its heart is the not-man.

As the girl circles…

(As Skyglass spiraled up and up and up in tight rhythmic abstractions.)

…cities spike and collapse around the tree; the girl becomes a woman, then a seam-faced crone. Her circles become hobbles, then a worm-crawl, then stasis. She puts herself at the tree’s roots, beneath the feet of the ageless, suspended PI.

(Shadows dimmed the stage; Skyglass was silent and still, except for the sound of a rattling wind from the Blowup and Devin’s heaving chest.)

The stars are fading, the city rubble blowing to dust. In the tree, the Pleasure Intelligence’s flesh dissolves, leaving black bones and blinking circuitry behind–and then those, too, dissolve. The tree follows, fragmenting in feather-shapes, leaving the woman. Her body shrinks, her eyes grow huge until only one can be seen. It dries into delicate leaf-skin and falls in on itself.

 

A gray like the snow in Moss’ cloud garden fogged the venue’s air. Devin kicked off his stilts, pulled the dress over his head, and returned to center stage barefoot, with nothing on except his rangy jump-ink trees and a pair of clingy black pants. The Blowup was finished, but there was still one last song.

It began with a chant, Devin and Zinn sharing a mic, which was so sexy I could barely stand it. On the other side of the stage, screaming into her own mic and beautiful in her wildness, Sable added a wailing tension to the chant, then a deep-throated chugging with the nasty distortion of her guitar. Moss followed, crisscrossing his hands as he accompanied her on the lowest of his drums.

Skyglass finished their set all bare and sweaty, all the sweeter for their raw and untamed spine-heart. I forced myself to relax as the last metallic hum of Moss’ cymbals died; I unfastened my hands from the hot, damp tangle they’d made of the stage’s gauzy backdrop. As the crowd dispersed and headed to the drinkup in the back of the venue, I started to message Zinn:

Curtains. Now—

But before I’d even pressed send, he was there, at my side in the curtains. I fisted a handful of his silky verdigris mane and drew him hard against my body, crushing our mouths together, slinking my free hand under his shirt.

“Wait,” he gasped, turning his head from mine.

“You,” I hissed. “Shut your rotsucking mouth.” I tried grabbing at him, but he wrenched away. I snarled at him, but he wouldn’t do as I wanted.

“Wait, Phoenix, just wait.”

“For what? You want me, but what–are you scared? You think I’ll burn your tasty little cock?”

He smirked. “It’s not little, and no, I don’t. Is it a problem that I want to go slow? To savor?”

“Yes, actually.” I was tired of waiting, and right then his stalling was really pissing me off.

“Too bad. If you want me, you have to go at my pace. I’m not– I–” For a moment he looked flustered, but he composed himself with annoying ease. “I don’t like moving that fast, okay? Anyway, that’s not what I’m here for.”

He inhaled, long and slow, and held it–like some ritual of air and lung–then carefully emptied the held breath. I glared at him, but let it be.

“One of my auto-hacks just pinged me.” He reached out and put his hand along my neck, his thumb pushing against the slow-beating pulse of my jugular, the hottest spot on my body. On the outside, anyway, I thought to myself with a snicker. Not that he’d know that.

“And?” I prompted.

“And it found your father. He’s in the borderlands, where the Gut and the Waste meet.” Zinn let go of me, the corners of his mouth quirking softly upward. “Thought you might like to know.”

Continued in Chapter 8.

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