Hurley's Heroes Collection 2015-2020, page 88
"This fucker's heavy," Nyx said, grunting at the weight of it.
"We still convinced this is a good idea?"
"I never have good ideas," Nyx said.
The slab grated, inching away from the sarcophagus. A glimmer of white light escaped the tomb and lit Tarifah's face from beneath. She appeared radiant, fiendish, transformed. Nyx paused, even as Khos pushed his side over another hand span, grunting with the effort.
Tarifah's visage put Nyx in mind of someone, though it took a breath to understand who. The flat black eyes, the quirk at the mouth that was not quite a smile, merely a sneer. A passion for blood, for death, as if to fill some hole deep inside of her.
Nyx knew that expression, because she saw it on her own face, far too often; when she could remember. When she did not break the mirror and use it to cut out some man's throat.
A snarling of white mist snapped out of the tomb. One finger. Then another. They curled around Tarifah's neck. She gurgled; her expression turning from lust to fear to panic.
"Close it!" Nyx yelled at Khos. "Close it!" She grabbed her end.
The mist became a cloud, enveloping Tarifah. She screamed; a high-pitched shriek. Her skin began to bubble, and peeled away from her body, carried away in strips by the lashing mist.
"Khos!" Nyx yelled.
They both pushed, sliding the slab back another few inches, but not enough.
The flayed swatches of Tarifah's skin floated in the air, leaving her face a weeping wound, her arms pink and oozing. She fell back onto the steps with a surprised grunt.
Anneke ran to her, "The fuck –"
"Kill it!" Tarifah yelled. "Kill it!"
Anneke took one of her bursts into her good hand and threw it into the sarcophagus. It landed and burst, spraying acid everywhere; the acid splattered the outside of the sarcophagus, drops landing on Nyx's burnous, and she swore as it ate through the fabric.
"Khos!" They heaved again together.
Anneke threw another burst. This one rattled into the sarcophagus and exploded dully, making the stone slab shudder and moan.
One last heave, and Nyx and Khos got the slab closed.
"Fuck," Nyx said, panting. She scrambled back down the steps to where Tarifah lay, a flayed, bloody suit of meat.
"Rhys! Rhys, can you help her?"
Rhys limped over, still exhausted. He shook his head. "I can… I can try and stabilize her. We have to get her to a magician, though."
"You see that throw, boss?" Anneke crowed. "You see that."
"Yes, thanks, Anneke, you're very smart," Nyx said. "Let's bundle her up." Nyx shed her burnous. "Can you dull the pain? Give her what you gave Anneke?"
Rhys nodded and doped her up. Then they wrapped Tarifah up. She and Khos carried her, one at either end. Nyx was thinking about her forty notes, and the flesh dealer she was leaving behind. Fuck.
Fuck.
They spoke little on the way back up through the belly of the beast.
Khos and Nyx settled Tarifah into the sled. Nyx sat next to her, holding her close as Khos and Rhys got the cats untied. The day had moved on into dusk; the blue light of the setting of the second sun still bruised the horizon.
"Fuck, Tarifah," Nyx said. "Bunch of monsters. When you going to get it, kid? There aren't any fucking monsters but us. Digging up shit that should stay down. Killing shit to prove… what? Shit, that's what. Nothing to nobody."
Nyx listened to the sound of her own breath. Turned to Tarifah's ruined face. Tarifah's eyed stared blankly into the distance, already losing their shine in the cool, dry air.
"Goddammit," Nyx said. "God damn you. God damn waste."
"All right," Rhys said, clambering into the sled. "We're ready. The nearest magicians' gym is –"
"Fuck it," Nyx said. "She's dead."
Rhys sighed and sat back in the sled. "Oh, no."
"There goes our forty notes!" Anneke said.
Khos folded his arms. "I need a walk," he said, and started off in the other direction.
Nyx appraised Tarifah's body a long moment, then, "I have an idea."
#
The meeting place Rohullah had given Nyx was along the Queen's highway. They traded the cats, sled, and a future favor to borrow a bakkie to take them the last twenty kilometers to the old, abandoned way station. Before the war way stations crossing this way had been oases, filled with water and vegetation; that's what all the murals on what remained of the walls advertised, anyway. In the deep afternoon light, they took on the unreal quality of hallucinations.
A long time ago, all of it. Somebody else's world.
Nyx went inside first, scattergun drawn. Khos drug the body with him, all wrapped up in Nyx's burnous.
"I've got what Rohullah promised you!" Nyx called into the dusty interior. Two large women came out of the back, where the kitchen had been. Both bore guns bigger than Anneke's. They took up positions at either side of the door to the back. From there, a young man entered, one that looked awfully familiar.
"Aw, fuck you," Nyx said.
The young man laughed. The same soft face and hands as the man in the room above the tavern, the one Rohullah said Nyx had killed. Same curly hair, slender build.
"I was worried Rohullah had let me down," he said. "I haven't heard from her in several days. But she did day you'd be punctual. Your ass on the line, and all. She says you're very attached to living."
Nyx gestured at the body in the burnous. "There's your flesh dealer.
He told the bodyguards to retrieve it. They did. He knelt over the swaddled body and revealed the flayed face of Tarifah. Or what was left of her. Grimaced. "A little ripe, isn't it?"
"Didn't last long once we took it out of the ground," Nyx said. "It's a wonder it hadn't already turned, like everything else we leave unburned. Could have turned into… fuck knows what, out here."
"Indeed," he said, and flicked the burnous back over the face. "I admit I'm disappointed. I hoped for something more… substantial. Alive."
"It was in a sarcophagus," Nyx said. "You can go check it out yourself, you don't believe us."
"Oh, I believe you," he said. "People like you, you know, disposable people, people short on cash and stocked up on guns, they can be bought cheaply. Very cheaply."
"A hundred notes," Nyx said.
He laughed again, and she hated it. He rooted around in his tunic pocked and pulled out a fat wad of notes. Peeled one off, balled it up, and threw it at her. "Enjoy it," he said.
Goddammit, she thought. Should have asked for more. Always. Always ask for more, from these fucks.
Khos glanced over at her. She nodded at the crumpled bill, and he retrieved it for her. She stuck it into her dhoti.
"Lose my name," Nyx said. "I don't do jobs for First Families."
He laughed. His laughter followed her outside and back into the bakkie. She rolled up the window, so she didn't have to listen to it.
#
When they got back to the storefront, Anneke went off to see a proper magician, and Khos headed out to the brothels. Nyx went to her office and spread the crumpled bill out on the surface of her desk.
Rhys knocked on the doorframe. "You need anything before prayer?"
"You used to be rich, right?" she said.
"I wouldn't say that."
"Better than us, then. You act it. No, don't answer. I know you were. You do something like that to somebody?"
He hesitated. Then, "My father would, yes. Others I knew, yes. That's how power works. The strong against the weak."
"I'm pretty strong, Rhys."
"The strongest person I know," he said, "but that doesn't always mean power."
"You ever want to burn this shit down?"
"All the time."
She put the bill into her drawer. "Hey, you have that story? About Nasnas?"
"I have a few, yes. One from The Sage and the Scholar."
"How about I pour some whisky and you make a tea and you read that shit to me, huh? They get him, in the end?"
"That spoils the story."
"Nah. Makes it more bearable, knowing what happens. I wanna know the bad guy gets it."
"The gift of tragedies," Rhys said, "knowing how it all turns out before you have to experience it."
"Yeah, that. I know how I'm going down. Makes this all more bearable."
"You know how you'll die?"
"Yeah," Nyx said, pulling out her bottle of whisky. "Whenever, wherever it happens – I'll be drinking."
Rhys made his tea. Nyx found a bottle of whisky and went up onto the roof; it was too hot to sleep downstairs anyway. She sat cross-legged on a dirty mat and he sank into the tatty old divan they kept up there.
The moons were shadowy crescents. The stars were out, bright, so bright, in all but that blackest part of the sky where there were no visible stars, only the abyss, their world out here at the edge of the galaxy, the edge of the universe, maybe, who knew? All alone, in the night.
Rhys began to read, and Nyx drank, thinking it was the only way she knew to keep her own monsters satiated, in this moment, and maybe, just maybe – the next moment, too. All the moments she had left in the world. However many she had left.
LEVIATHAN
THE LAST TIME our leviathan went sour, I was a kid, nigh higher than dad's knee. I made the jump in his arms. Two of my fathers died on the kick through the ether between the leviathans; breathless, frozen, saliva bubbling on their tongues.
But one of my mamas waited on the other side. Took me into her arms as my dad huffed and wheezed. The air was so much sweeter, inside the new leviathan. That's how I knew we'd made the jump all right. Sweet air, the songs always said, that's the tell. Sweet air, fresh food, clear water that doesn't taste like metallic feet. Every new leviathan is a new future. Means the ether hasn't sucked us dry yet. We get a few more turns. Sing to the gods!
The fun of the new leviathans is in the exploring. My mam, Mam Joi, was an explorer. She got extra rations and social skin for risking her air to map out the new leviathan. Mapping a leviathan wasn't a thing that ever ended, though. You just did it for a few generations, until the air and food and water went bad. Then you jumped again. Always another leviathan floating out there, in the dark. How many? No one knew. Thousands upon thousands, at least. Circling some dusty rock below us like shattered stars. A gift to us from the gods.
I'd sit up in the watch station in the new leviathan and stare out at the mass of leviathans, so thick that they occasionally collided, spilling salvage and bodies; massive piñatas. The gods had made these great homes for us, all circling this great gory rock; the rock the gods lived on, some said. Only gods could live on stone alone.
It's easy to lose people, when you go dipping into a new leviathan. Mam Joi knew this when she took my brother out on expeditions to train him in the art of recon. He died before he even had hair on his chest, incinerated in a fire. Fire, one of our worst fears. I had a sister who asphyxiated when debris from a shattered leviathan pierced our living quarters; she got sucked into the black.
But I wasn't afraid, when Mam Joi offered to take me with her to explore the new leviathan. I was awed, maybe, in rapture, some people call it, awe at this great beast built by some other people, our ancestors some said, but I can't imagine we'd be able to make something so grand. Leviathans were gifts from fickle gods, tossed out here to remind us of their benevolence. The gods tasked us with uncovering what gifts the leviathans contained, and we offered up some of the best salvage to them; the beautiful but unnecessary trinkets they had left behind.
"How many levels have we mapped?" I asked my mam as we suited up in the explorer lockers, checking old taped patches on some of the seams of our suits, knocking at our helmets to ensure they were still sound.
"Only half of this first level," mam said. "We got the old power source going and there's sweet air up here, and pockets more below. We're strictly salvage, though. We aren't there to pressurize areas. That's for the hab teams. Understand?"
I did. Explorers always went first.
We pulled on magnetic boots and gloves with worn, beaded metal groove that helped us keep our grip. We carried the tools of our profession: grappling hooks, rappelling rope, recording and mapping devices, three extra oxygen canisters each at our belts. The thin suits we wore kept us safe in case we entered airless rooms, but their effectiveness against the cold was less good. Coming out of a suit after a few hours, all you want to do is press yourself up against a heating slab and sweat it out under a pile of blankets until the heat sears your bones.
From the locker area, we walked to the pressurized gateway at the end of the livable section of the leviathan. Two arms-guards waited there, both in suits in case the seal gave out. I had lost another parent that way; guarding a level that was supposed to be cleared. The leviathans groaned and heaved; the boots could save us from the brunt of that, but not if the leviathans chose to eject us into the blackness and steal our air with it.
"The ether is always desperate for air," one of my fathers once told me. "It's because it doesn't have any out there. The great black sea is jealous of our air and wants to hoard it, to fill all that empty space."
We passed through the sealed gateway and into the pressure chamber. My mam cycled the lock, and we passed through into the airless spaces inside the leviathan.
Other explorers had already mapped out a few of these corridors. We followed the rope they had put out, hitching ourselves to it with carabiners, lifting our magnetic boots. Sometimes gravity pulled at our feet and sometimes it did not.
"Each stomach of the leviathan rotates differently," Mam Joi explained during my early explorer training. "Sometimes the floor is above you. The ceiling below. Always keep your eyes down, at your feet. It will keep you oriented. Stop you from getting sick."
We descended through a massive ring in the floor, its edges seared. For a moment I dangled free, weightless, until my boots came close enough to the floor below. I gave a little gasp, swinging my headlamp toward a mounded shape in the dim. A body lay twisted against the wall, free floating, tangled in a shimmering green substance.
"What's that around it?" I asked.
"Algae, we think," mam said. "From the air production area just below. It's grown wild. Suited to the conditions here."
"But it's so cold."
"Many simple plants can endure cold far better than we can."
"Could we breathe here?"
"Possibly. But let's not risk that. We have two more canisters of time to go."
I checked the level of oxygen in my current canister. Still mostly full.
The explorers before us had tied off the lead rope just in front of what appeared to be a cavernous mouth of a door, the top of the archway etched with what looked like teeth.
Mam Joi hooked a new rope to the carabiner the other was attached to. I attached one as well, and we regarded the great doorway.
She tapped at the doorway. "You'll want to check for vibrations or heat," she said. Nodded. "This is clear. Get ready to breach."
Mam Joi pressed a small explosive charge in the seam of the doorway and blew it open. The explosion was small. We still had to take crowbars to the gash in the door to peel it open enough to fit through.
My mam went first. As I came through, she thumped her hand against my chest. "Watch your footing. There's a fall here."
I squeezed beside her and gazed into a great black wound in the floor. The ceiling? I tried to orient myself and stopped. Eyes down. Only down.
She tilted her head, aiming the lamp below. The breach seemed to go on forever. I could not see the bottom.
"Secure this," mam said, and handed me a second rope, this one a sturdy belay braided with metal fibers.
I hooked it around a fragment of the door panel still affixed to the wall and drilled in another anchor bolt.
"I'll go first," mam said.
"Will it hold? I'm smaller, mam. Let me—
"No! I want it tested before you descend.”
Explorers always go first.
I bit the inside of my lip. Mam Joi did not like it when anyone argued with her. But I could see that the tear in the floor got smaller as it went. I would fit better, as it tightened. She would need to blast or crank it open to get down more levels.
But I hung back and let her begin the descent over the lip of the crater. The gravity shifted as she went. She had to kick off the next level to make the third. I began to lose sight of her, and knelt at the edge of the platform, peering after her.
"How far will you go?" I asked.
"Until I can't anymore," she said, her breath loud over our radio channel. "Hey, stay away from that edge. Listen, I need to tell you—"
The leviathan heaved beneath us.
I swayed, my boots keeping me level. The rope scraped against the edge of the wound in the leviathan. We twisted again, the world rolling around us; the ceiling becoming the wall; the floor becoming the wall. The rope snarled. Tore.
I cried out. "Mam, the rope! Get—"
The rope broke.
"Fuck!" Mam's voice, then—nothing.
I clung to the edge of the hole, staring at the frayed rope. The leviathan settled; whatever had rocked us was not enough to send us spinning. I closed my eyes, trying to control my heaving stomach.
I had to go after her.
I searched for another way down but could find nothing. I would have to belay on a second rope. My guts seized up. I huffed in a big breath and set another anchor point next to the one where my mam's rope was affixed. Then I held tight to the new length of rope and tipped myself over the edge—face first.
I plummeted into the cavernous dark, slowing my descent only after seeing the first two levels whiz by, catching only a few breathless glimpses of the dead, and something more—spidery white substances that coated the walls, the dead screens, the jagged wayfinding markers on the walls. That was not algae.
On and on I went; four levels, five and then—my feet hit bottom, the magnetic boots sticking despite the slime on the floor beneath me.
