Pacific Fire (15 page)

Sam was mesmerized by the hound's eye. It seemed to do more than merely see him. It seemed to be swallowing him.

“I'm known for the quality of my product,” she said. “Most of my acquisitions are beneath the standards of my best customers, and I sell them off cheap. But sometimes I find special items. And I have some very, very exclusive customers in the market for a very special item. They gave me a sample of what I was to look for. Just a speck of essence. Little more than a mote. And it was the most wonderfully potent thing I've ever smelled. And do you know what?”

“I smell like a mote?”

The pupil closed to a small inky dot.

“Very much.” She turned to one of her subordinates. “Don't leech this one. We need to deliver him fresh.”

“What about the girl?” the leech said, indicating Em. “She was with him.”

“She doesn't smell like much. Put her at the front of the line. We'll use her to calibrate our knives.”

Sam lunged at the hound. The crack of the rifle butt on the back of his neck was like thunder. Hands caught him before he struck the deck. They were happy to hurt him, but they didn't want him damaged.

*   *   *

Sam's toes scraped the deck boards as the leeches dragged him by the armpits. He never lost consciousness, and so he took in the promised horrors of the enclosed deck. Buzzing fluorescents cast a pale blue light that would make healthy people look like they'd been dead for a week. Long steel tables with built-in drains ran the entire length of the deckhouse. Tools were stuck on magnetic strips—knives and cleavers and saws and scalpels and shears and picks. There were power grinders and drills and circular saws. Shelves were stacked with an exotic array of beakers and flasks and jars for storing osteomancy drawn from the bodies. Hooks and hoists on chains dangled overhead.

“Always a bad idea to tour the kitchen,” Sam tried to say, but it came out as an unintelligible mumble.

With the exception of himself, no single one of the captives was likely very rich with osteomancy. These were users, mostly of watered-down magical preparations. But their combined magics formed a deep, crackling odor. To Sam's shame, he found it delicious.

A row of steel-barred cages lined the bulkhead. They were narrow, not much more than closets to tuck mops or an ironing board in, and each held a single captive. Armed leeches loaded the captives inside, and a single thug with a bayonet-fitted rifle stood guard, a job which seemed to largely involve keeping out of vomiting range.

Sam lifted his twelve-ton head to find Em but didn't see her. And now he began to resist. He tried planting his feet, but the leeches, a powerfully built man and a just as powerfully built woman, kept dragging him along. He twisted in their grip and managed only to earn a hard slap in the face. The woman adjusted her hold and took his thumb and pinky in one hand and did something that shot pain all the way to his jaw.

“Fuck you and your kung fu,” Sam said, and she did something else that made him scream.

They pushed him into a cage. He lunged at the leeches as they slammed the cage door shut, and his face ran into the bars. The guard with the bayonet gave him a reptilian glare.

Magic should work differently, he thought. It should respond to anger. It should respond to need.

A whisper from the next cage. “Hey.”

It was Em. A partition between them blocked his view.

“Hey,” he whispered back.

The hum of the engines rose in pitch and the deck rocked as the boat pulled away from the pier. Technicians came down the gangway and took their positions at the table, arranging their tools and making small talk about sports and real estate.

“How are you feeling?” Em said.

He knew the full question behind her casual query.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Your recovery time is kind of inconvenient.”

“It doesn't take me this long to recover from everything, I assure you.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “You're totally a virgin.”

“Not technically speaking, I'm not.” He wished he could see her roll her eyes.

“Technically?”

“I think the amount of time I spend thinking about sex ought to count for something.”

She laughed, just a little bit, and he realized he'd never heard her laugh before. It sounded glorious.

The guard came back to stand in front of Em's cage, and she hushed up. He gave a nod over to a technician at a row of switches on the wall. There was an electronic buzz and some mechanical noises, and Em's cage door sprang open.

“Out,” snapped the guard.

And now Em's bravado shattered.

“No,” she whimpered. “No, please, no.” As wonderful as the sound of her laughter had been, the sound of her fear and meek despair came from another reality.

There were noises of a brief scuffle, and they dragged her from the cage by her hair. Em shrieked now, sobbed, and Sam grabbed the bars of his cage, and he shook them and screamed, inarticulate with rage. He begged for the magic in his bones to erupt. He cursed the guard, he cursed the leech technicians, who didn't even lift their eyes from their work, and he cursed Daniel for being a poor teacher. He cursed himself for being useless.

Em's face was red, the muscles in her neck taut, and just then, Sam noticed that despite the pitiful sounds of her weeping, no tears fell. In fact, she was smiling. She twisted. Her foot went into the guard's knee. She had one of his hands, and then his arm, and she did something to his elbow that made his arm bend the wrong way, and then she had his bayonet. She drove the blade in and out of his eye. The technician who'd opened her cage reached for another switch, this one big and red, and Em shot him through the hand. The crack of the rifle sounded like a breaking bone. The leech at the gangway fired a shot in her general direction. It went far wide and he turned to race up the gangway. Em shot him in the head. She shot two more.

“Everybody sit down.” She spoke just loud enough for her voice to be clearly heard through the deckhouse.

The technicians did as they were told.

A leech came down the gangway from the upper deck, firing. Em pulled the trigger and he fell.

She went to the switches.

Another leech came down the gangway. Em shot him twice, once in the knee, and then in the chest. She waited a few seconds to see if anyone else was coming down, then began throwing switches to open the cages. A few of the captives came out. Others stayed back.

“I've killed six guards,” Em said. “You have their guns and a whole lot of knives. Stay below deck until you get an all-clear. Don't let the techs overwhelm you. Kill them if you have to. And keep your heads down. There's going to be gunfire above.”

Some of the captives still wouldn't leave their cages. Some cowered. But a few stepped forward and gathered the guns of the fallen guards.

Blood streamed down Em's bayonet. She pushed away a lock of hair and smeared red across her forehead. Her eyes looked like stone.

So this was Em, being an Emma.

“How many above?” Sam asked her.

“I counted seven more, plus the hound.”

“Any idea how we're getting off this boat?”

“Yeah,” she said. She took a cleaver from one of the technician's racks. “You're not going to like it.”

*   *   *

Em held the cleaver to Sam's throat. He felt a thin, cold line against his jugular. In her other hand she held the bayonet. Sam offered no resistance and let her walk him up the gangway to the deck.

The first obstacle they encountered was the pink-faced man who'd first captured them in the San Andreas Abyss. He was waiting at the top of the gangway, his gun inches away from Sam's face.

“No bullshit,” said Em. “I know you want him alive, and you want his lovely osteomantic tissues unspoiled by dirty metal. Throw your guns overboard or I shoot him.”

Sam was wider and taller than Em, and there was no way for Pinky to shoot her without going through Sam. He flung his weapon over the side. It hit the canal with a satisfying splash.

“Good,” Em said. “Now go jump after it.”

Pinky snarled out the word “fuck” before Em thrust the bayonet forward between Sam's arm and side and punctured Pinky's belly. Pinky let out one long “Owwwww” and doubled over.

“What are they paying you guys?” Em called out.

Sam heard a noise behind him. He didn't get a chance to warn Em, because she pivoted around and tilted the gun up. There was another bone-crack from the rifle and someone fell, facedown, from the top of the deck. A pool of blood spread from his head. He didn't move.

“How much are they paying you?” she repeated.

“Two percent of the job,” answered a voice. Sam didn't see its source. The rest of the leeches had hunkered down under cover.

“Your job's busted,” Em said. “So, math problem: What's two percent of nothing?”

There were no answers. Sam supposed it was a rhetorical question.

“I make four of you left,” Em said. “So I better see four people jumping overboard, or I'm going to kill my expensive hostage and then hunt you down and shoot your knees out just to hear your voices.”

“Overboard, fellas,” blared a voice from a speaker horn: the hound. She was probably in the wheelhouse.

One guy took a life jacket with him, but the rest just clambered over the rail and dropped into the canal.

The ability to impel someone to do what you told them, just with words, was a power as useful as magic. Sam liked how Em wielded it.

But she still had the cleaver to his throat.

“You can let me go now.”

“Not yet. I don't want to lose my leverage,” Em said, and Sam was seized by a queasy moment of doubt. Had he misjudged this situation? Had he misjudged Em?

“Shall we negotiate?” the hound said over the loudspeaker. “You must know what he's worth.”

“I have your treasure, and you have no more thugs,” Em shouted. “I don't need to share.”

Drive head back into Em's face. Drive foot into her knee. Maybe she'd slice his jugular. Maybe bayonet him. Maybe shoot him. He'd need luck. He'd need chaos to work in sympathy with his intent.

That was Daniel thinking.

Sam let her hold him there, with her cleaver on his skin.

He chose this moment to trust Em more than he'd ever trusted anyone or anything. He was going to ridiculous lengths to prevent Otis and his Pacific firedrake from killing people beyond his ability to count, and he decided that if he couldn't trust Em, the world wasn't worth saving.

“You're still on my boat,” the hound said. “And you're not going to take the wheelhouse while I'm in it.”

“That's why I'm taking your dinghy,” Em said.

“My boat's a lot faster than the dinghy. I'll just follow you.”

“I think you're going to find yourself delayed.

“All clear,” Em called down the gangway. The captives came up cautiously, led by a few who'd claimed the guards' guns and others who took up knives and cleavers. The owl-eyed man blinked in the harsh sunlight.

“It's a nice day to go boating,” he said.

“The boat's not yours yet,” she told him and the others. “The hound is in the wheelhouse, and she's more dangerous than the others. But there's only one of her, and there're a lot of you.”

“Even odds?” said the girl with the stunted condor wings. She'd claimed a handgun.

“Maybe a little less than even,” Em said. “But better than the steel tables.”

The captives began moving toward the wheelhouse, and Em finally took the cleaver from Sam's throat. He felt something larger than relief.

“Thanks,” he said, rubbing his Adam's apple.

They made for the stern and hurried down a ladder to the dinghy. Em took position at the outboard motor and Sam untied the tow rope. Gunshots rang out as they zipped away from the factory boat and raced through canal traffic at full throttle. Em stared straight ahead, her jaw set like granite. Tears glimmered in her eyes.

“Are you okay?”

“I hate shooting people,” she said. “I just fucking hate it.”

Sam watched out for police and for the factory boat and for more leeches as Em sped on, steering the dinghy and weeping.

 

TEN

Sam and Em arrived in Los Angeles on a vivid afternoon. The snowcapped San Gabriel Mountains loomed behind the jade and azure towers of downtown. Palatial clouds sailed overhead. Daniel always described LA as big and messy and sprawling. But never beautiful.

“Quit gawking,” Em said, guiding the dinghy through midday traffic. “You look like a rube.”

“I am a rube. I didn't think the buildings would be this tall.” He craned his neck to watch an airship approach the mooring tower of an emerald-green skyscraper at least eighty stories high.

Em steered around a cement-mixing scow, its drum rotating on its way to a construction site.

“How many times have you been in LA?” he asked Em.

“Three times, on rescue missions. My first time, we broke golems out of the Playboy Mansion. That was weird.”

She'd been acting like herself since the leeches, but there was a strain in her manner, in her posture, in her voice. She'd killed people on the glue factory boat. It weighed heavy on her. But she was still with him.

After a brief stop at a hardware store to shoplift some tools, she drove them to a range of foothills off the La Cienega locks, where they left the dinghy in a dead-end canal. With shovel and crowbar over their shoulders, they hiked up a trail of green and yellow grasses. A sign said
NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS SUBJECT TO MINISTRY OF JUSTICE DISPENSATION PENALTIES
. Sam wanted nothing to do with having justice dispensed at him, but Em ignored the sign and cut a hole in a rusted chain-link fence.

They crept through oil fields. Pump jacks cranked up and down, pulling dwindling amounts of crude petroleum and magic from deep underground. Climbing among the mechanical squeaks and hisses, Sam and Em reached summit, where they paused to catch their breath. From here, the Hierarch used to launch dragon flames at enemy aircraft from beyond his borders, or at rebellious osteomancers inside his borders. Now, the place was occupied by a few radio transmission towers and the cracked remains of wartime catapult bunkers.