Itch: Nine Tales of Fantastic Worlds (13 page)

Oh yeah
. Card-carrying crazy.

“My partner is nearby. You saw him move. You won’t get away.”

He’s blinking still, but my words seem to push through his confusion. “Did you know they still bring in soil and water and people from outside? That’s how I got in.”

No, there weren’t. White Snow, Rella, and Princetown stayed together, trading and moving as a unit across what was left of the world—we’d all seen the vids—but we’re a closed system of three. No need to bring in contamination.

“It’s not dead.” He sniffs like he read my mind. “Quite the contrary. Not dead at all.”

It didn’t matter if Outside lived or not. The problem was that humans couldn’t live in it, so we stayed Inside. Even if White Snow wanted to rid herself of us.

Which I don’t believe. I’ve never believed the stories. It’s fear mongering, only.

The acceleration slows and I breathe better, but I still can’t move fast enough to pull my gun arm up.

Again like he’s read my mind, pretty boy glances at my hand. “Are you going to shoot me?” He has that apple still. The fruit of dreams, inside White Snow. It’s still as beautiful as him, and still unmarred by the forces around it.

A Cheshire smile spreads across his handsome face. “I’ve never been shot before.”

For the first time, fear mingles with my guts’ flattening and I want to throw up. I want to puke on the pretty boy and his crazy and make him get the hell away from me.

“You can have it,” he says, holding the apple in front of my nose. Crispness tickles both my nostrils and my lips and I want to take a bite in the same pheromone-laced way I want to be next to the pretty boy.

“It’s okay. It’s not poison. It will help. It will help all of you. You can live outside again. Isn’t that what your kind wants? To walk your world again?” He’s blinks in an unnatural rhythm and I can’t help but think
frog
. But he’s not a frog. He’s lovely.

“We had a malfunction. We didn’t mean to crash into your world. We’re very sorry.” The apple rubs against my lips.

I want it, even with my stomach pressing into my throat. Even as White Snow twists her hand and we roll forward,
up
becoming
front
and
down
becoming
back
.

Pretty boy and I hang, but he clutches the branch with his grip-soles and seems less perturbed by the shift than even the best free climbers. I don’t drop away from the support—the g-force cranks on my neck and my gut pushes toward my feet. I slid down the surface, held to it by the g-force, but facing downward. Untethered, I’d bounce through the piers and the corridors, a bag of meat falling and falling.

My muscles cinch. My tether contracts with a hiss and I know I won’t fall, but the fear is still there. And for a moment, I forget about the pretty boy and his apple.

Below me, the diffuse pinkness of the Nail abruptly shifts blue. Through the garden’s sphere, I glimpse strips of violet shadow falling across this rich person’s neighborhood. White Snow is about to place her hand on Princetown’s shoulder.

We’re going to dock to the other city, if only for a quick moment, probably to do data exchange. Maybe an energy trade. But there’s always potential for crossing when these quick touches happen. Conduits always open.

My mind snaps back to the pretty boy. He’s eyeing the subdermal fatty layer, watching for, I assume, a pore to open.

Damn it
, I think. That’s why he’s here. Crossings at the Nethers are strictly controlled. But most pores open and close too fast for people to cross. Unless they’re crazy. And strong.

“You are under arrest for assaulting an officer.” Maybe I can scare him into not moving.

He blinks at me again, his brow knitting.

A
clunk
reverberates through the neighborhood, more a quake than a sound, and the g-force stops with sudden, jarring intensity.

I drop away from the support, expecting my tether to hold me in open space, hanging safely.

Except I don’t stop. The pretty boy must have done something. Panic spasms my muscles and I drop my gun but not my training. I don’t let out the scream sticking in my throat. I dive. I twist. But I don’t scream.

I’m through branches and between supports before I breathe again, rolling first left, then right. My body can’t be distracted. The tether
will
work. It’s whipping and—

The pretty boy snatches me. I jerk upward, my tether finding its control and snaking around his, taking hold. I’m above the fatty layer, swinging, safe for the moment.

The pretty boy’s arm wraps around my waist and he’s staring at my face, his weird eyes gleaming. “You were born like this, right? No augmentations to meddle?”

I feel my tether crawling upward, looking for its own support, much the same way panic is crawling up my spine. “Listen to me, you freak.” Gurgling comes from below us. “My tether has yours.” The fatty layer bucks and folds. “You are to remain motionless until my partner arrives and instructs you to do otherwise.”

His face contorts as he looks down at the opening pore. “We didn’t mean to do what we did. Once we realized your planet’s ecosystem supported advancing life forms, we were going to let you be.”

He swings a little and we center over the black dot below us. “I think the sight of your mech cities dazzled our pilot. I think he thought they were alive and that we’d found the home of legendary creatures.”

“Stop talking. Crazy will not help you in court.” He’s babbling and I don’t want to hear it. The pore looks big enough to let him through. Him, not me. If he drops, if I don’t get away from him, I’ll end up crushed.

“We were an environmental adjustment ship. Our purpose was what you call terraforming. We… malfunctioned when we crashed.” He blinks again, looking directly into my eyes. “We are sorry.”

His other hand swings up into my field of vision. He still has that damned apple. The lush, lovely apple. “Eat.”

“You are under arrest for threatening an—” He takes a bite and sweet, fresh apple juice hits my face.

“Damn it!” I cringe but it’s too late. He yanks me toward him.

His mouth covers mine. I feel his tongue pushing between my lips and the next thing I know, there’s apple in my throat. He’s pushing it in and I can’t gag so my body does the next best thing from its point of view. It swallows.

“We’re sorry it took us this long to develop the necessary tailoring for your species.” He watches the pore widen. “And that so many of your kind Outside died.”

The panic surfaces. I try to vomit out the apple, but it won’t come up.

“The seed will spread to all of you once it learns the small intricacies of the Inside humans. You’ll sleep through it, so don’t worry.”

A yell comes from above. Jensen is okay and looking for me.

The pretty boy glances up at our tethers. “You’re attached. You’ll be safe now.”

I think he’s smiling, but it’s not quite right. His mouth is too wide. “I’ll come back for you. I will find you. Then I’ll wake you up. Don’t worry.”

It
was
a poison apple.

“You’ll get to leave this place.”

We
are
lice.

The beautiful boy’s tether releases from his body at the same time he lets go of my waist. He drops, still smiling, and vanishes into the pore. I stare after him, wondering how long the hole will stay open. Wondering if, on the other side, he’ll do the same thing to someone else. If he’ll poison another cop with his crazy rantings.

Jensen resets my tether and hauls me up. I’m already sleepy and my words slur when he holds me to his chest to carry me back to the vehicle. I hope he knows what happened, but I suspect he doesn’t.

And I hope, when my partner sleeps, the pretty boy will come back for him, as well.

~ ~ ~

The seven previous stories inhabited their own, individual worlds. The following two tales occur in the
Fate – Fire – Shifter – Dragon
universe; the first, the novella
Conpulsio
, in its past.

The second,
Cinder to Dust
, in its present.

During the infamous night Vesuvius destroys Pompeii, two important questions explode in
Conpulsio
: Who is bound? Who is compelled?

In
Cinder to Dust,
a mother makes the most agonizing decision of her life…

August 23, 79 AD

The girl didn’t fight.

Ladon held her firm, one hand on her elbow, the other gripping her forehead. He twisted her in the center of her family’s villa, on the exquisite tiles of the open courtyard, under the bright Roman sky. In this place a family such as hers tasted only the best wines and chewed only the best meats. They twirled in rich fabrics and laughed at slaves.

This rich Roman’s paradise. The lands where the Emperor’s favorites thought themselves safe from dragons.

But now, here, the girl’s cheeks trembled, setting her lips fluttering as she tried to gasp one last time. Tried to breathe, her body unwilling and surprised, even though he knew she’d taken this act of retribution as her fate. That she’d offered it up to the gods.

And now the hot noon sun seared the back of Ladon’s neck, crawling like wasps, stinging and biting and screaming that he served justice. Though he felt the looseness of her hands. Saw the blankness of her eyes. He knew now, right now, his actions were correct.

Retribution held him firm. Obligation lurched through his body like a bolt lighting the inside of his skull. The demand for balance raged and set him into slicing motion. These engagements, these solid weights in his soul, they churned. They wound his muscles and spun in his ears and he had no choice but to set them free here, in this villa.

So Ladon held the girl, this child whose name he did not know and whose death would right the scales tipped by his niece’s murder. One hand gripped her elbow. The other wrapped tight around her forehead as he pulled back her head at the correct angle to expose as much of her neck’s flesh as possible. He performed this movement over the swirling ocean colors of the villa’s tiles, his companion beast Dragon behind him on one side, his
tribunus
at his other.

The beast pranced under the sun’s glare behind him, his mimicking hide refracting in the brightness of midday. He vanished as he imitated the walls of the villa, then reappeared, rolling and jolting around Ladon’s
tribunus
, Andreas. The big man stepped into the shadows, his
gladius
drawn. He’d said nothing, done nothing to stop their descent onto the villa, only followed behind, his face the flat mask of a warrior’s response.

Ladon turned the girl’s body away—an instinctive and adept move of someone whose life brimmed with violence and death and murder—to keep the smear from his skin. But blood coated his armor. Blood muddied his sandals. He gripped the dagger and blood touched his fingers. Death wafted from the girl in waves of metallic stench. Death by blood.

Death he tasted.

But she’d angled herself toward him anyway and the sky-like shade of her eyes flashed vivid as the day. Her hand lifted to his arm in a conscious arc, as if she’d practiced the movement. As if she danced with him, this child who was not quite a woman. This child of a murdering Fate.

The girl was to be one-third of a Fate triad meant to be the Emperor’s own. They were to bring glory to Rome by seeing all there was to see:
what-was
,
what-is
, and
what-will-be
.

Ladon snatched away the promise of her kind and the future of the Empire. It bled out onto the tile mosaic of her father’s country villa at the foot of a smoking mountain. And his actions, the weights in Ladon’s soul, they spun high. They pushed into his veins and out across the energy connecting him to Dragon. Both he and the beast ripped and tore and Rome paid for the crimes of this girl’s father.

On his arm, her fingers let go. First one, then another, then another. Then her palm lifted off his elbow.

He dropped her corpse. Her head hit first, a sharp snap. The rest of her rolled on the grit, scratching out a call to the dead. Ladon stepped back.

Behind him, Dragon danced, a mirage of rage.

The girl’s future-seeing father should have seen this moment in his visions of
what-will-be
. His triad was the best of their kind.

Yet death lay as a pile of girl at Ladon’s feet. Thirteen years old. Not yet a woman.

Ladon had done what he needed to do—a child for a child. He’d taken the light from this girl to balance the dark hole that had once been Sister’s daughter. His niece.

He served justice. Behind him, Andreas nodded once, sheathing his
gladius
. He understood. He’d not interfered.

The Fates brought this war. Ladon had done his duty.

Dragon stepped over the dead girl, his talons sinking into the sand under the pressure of his forelimbs on the edge of the courtyard’s tile. He swung his big head first left, then right, and a pulse of light burst off his hide.
Human
, he pushed into Ladon’s mind.
We must leave
.

Yes
, Ladon pushed back. They’d leave. Go west, away from Vesuvius’s flank, now that they’d fulfilled their promise to his sister.

Ladon stared at the dead girl. Her blood formed a crescent on the tile, a shadow that curved toward his feet. Above the rim of the villa, dust rising from Vesuvius’s cone bent in the opposite direction, another shadow mirroring an ended life. They coiled like the gates to Hades, one to its depths, one to its brightness.

If the gate opened for her, or for him, Ladon did not know.

Andreas clasped his shoulder. “Come.”

Ladon nodded, the dagger dropping from his fingers and rattling across the tile. He’d leave it. He had no use for it now.

He glanced one more time at the stillness in the center of the spreading bloodstain, what had been a girl, and stepped away.

She hadn’t fought.