The Apocalypse Ocean (6 page)

By the time they got out of the sewers and onto the streets, Tiago couldn’t tell where in Harbortown he was. They’d doubled back, and around, and it was so late it was now probably officially early. His eyes were scratchy and his movements felt like they were delayed by a half second.

Then he recognized the buildings around him. Market-square.

In the early morning hush the square looked otherworldly. Fishermen were putting out buckets and trays. Stalls were getting prepped.

Two Runners met them and guided them to a red brick two-story house by the edge of the Market-square.

“Don’t worry,” Kay told Tiago as she led him inside past two Ox-men who stood guard near the door. “You’ll be safe here. Lots of people and activity here. And if Nashara doesn’t make it back, we’ll keep the Doaq focused on other things. I’ll keep you both safe, believe me.”

She was reassuring, and calm.

But Tiago fought the calmness she projected onto him. This was the Doaq. It would find them. It would hunt them. It would end them. He believed that in the core of his bones.

Kay sensed that fight in her. She moved closer and rubbed his shoulder. “Tiago, believe me: you are both important.”

She remained there, close and intimate, keeping eye contact, until the fear in Tiago receded. Not completely gone, but enough that Tiago was manageable again. June was still in a state of shock, following them around. A few nudges from Kay was all it took to get his compliance.

 There were Ox-men guarding the house everywhere, which should have reassured Tiago. But he’d seen the Doaq chew through them all so quickly in the night that it didn’t reassure him much at all.

“Okay, for tonight your room is upstairs,” Kay said. “Let me show you.”

They followed her up the polished wooden steps, Tiago not daring to touch the fine brass guardrail in case he left fingerprints or dirt on it, to the large double doors at the top of the stairs.

With a flourish Kay opened them.

Tiago stood at the threshold, something in him unwilling to take another step. There were two beds on each side of the room, plump with soft mattresses and pillows, draped with flowing sheets. The small couch under the window looked more comfortable than anything he’d ever sat on in his life.

A pitcher of water and several glasses sweated cold condensation on a corner board, and there were even expensive looking books on shelves on the left hand side.

Kay beckoned them into the room, and they both stepped into it as if it were a dream. “There’s a bathroom around the corner. A change of clothes for each of you. Clean yourselves up, I’ll have the steward come in with something to eat. You’re safe here. Rest. Both of you. And I will see you later.”

Some people lived every day like this, Tiago thought, as he stepped onto a purple rug with diamond patterns in the center of the room.

It smelled of flowers.

Kay swept past them and out the doors. They thudded shut behind her, and that was followed by the sound of a lock creaking as they were both locked in.

Tiago walked over to the doors and tugged at the handle. It didn’t budge.

He could see June stagger over to the foot of one of the beds and slump to the floor, curled into a ball and crying silently to himself. 

Tiago prowled around the massive room. For one, as much as he was awed by the carpet and furniture, the massive beds, he couldn’t help shaking a feeling that there was so much wasted space. Why not cut the room into four little ones? Keep the luxurious comforts, but did there need to be all this wasted space
between
everything?

Maybe that was the point, he thought, as he looked into the bathroom.

No door out of that. No window either.

The only window was behind the couch. It had metal bars over it, but they were locked to each other and hinged, so that they could open. They were to guard against people trying to get in, not out.

Someone started unlocking the large doors, and Tiago slumped to sit on the couch casually. A tall man came in with fresh juices and cold meat sandwiches.

He seemed to expect Tiago to choose a few off the platter he held, but Tiago took the platter out of his hands and put it on the couch. “Thank you!” he said brightly.

The tall man stared at Tiago, and Tiago stared at the tall man until he finally relented and turned around and left, locking the doors again behind him.

Tiago took the platter over to June, still at the foot of the bed. “Eat,” Tiago insisted. “You’ll feel better.”

June wiped his cheeks with the cuff of his grimy shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said, deepening his voice and pulling himself together. “It all happened so fast.”

“I know,” Tiago muttered.

They ripped into the cold meat sandwiches with a brief sort of ferocity, and then drank. Then came in for more.

June paused after swallowing. “Do you trust her?”

Tiago looked up and wanted to say he did, but the words caught in his mouth. “Kay? You don’t trust her. You do what she says or you’ll pay. That’s how I understand it. You should too. You’re important to her, but she will hurt you to get her way. I’ve seen it. You understand? This is Placa del Fuego, not Palentar, or some poofy Xenowealth world.” Tiago waved around at the luxurious room.

June put the remains of his sandwich down, appetite apparently lost. “But, she’s just a girl …”

“All this, this is her doing,” Tiago said. “You’ll see, soon enough.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with her,” he said. “I’ve had enough. I just want to go back to Palentar …”

The boy looked exhausted.

“I’m sorry,” Tiago muttered. “I’m very sorry. I thought you would be going with Nashara. Then you’d be back in your easy world and in your good life.”

In another time, those words would have been said bitterly. But for now, Tiago actually wished all that for June.

“The woman who tore the door off the wagon? Wait, Nashara? From the Xenowealth? Is she one of
The
Nasharas?”

Tiago nodded. “Yes. One of them. Exactly. And she’s looking for Pepper. He fought the Doaq too, on Palentar.”

“That was Pepper? From New Anegada?” June pretty much whispered. He put his head in his hands. “I was home alone. Then the walls exploded, and he just stood there.”

Tiago leaned forward. “What did he say to you?” That, after all, was what this was all about. The great secret. The thing that Nashara and Kay were destroying neighborhoods over.

“Nothing,” June hissed. “He didn’t say anything at all. He stood there for a moment, tapping his foot, looking around. When the house started to fall in, he grabbed me, set me down on the street outside, and then took off.”

“That’s it?” Tiago said in shock. All this had been for nothing?

All this had been for nothing!

And what the hell would Kay do when she found out?

Tiago looked at June. He was probably dead. He was useless, and she wouldn’t need him causing more trouble.

Oh, poor kid, he thought.

“Kay isn’t going to like that story,” Tiago said slowly to June.

And to June’s credit, he got it right away. He looked frightened. “What do I do?”

He was asking Tiago. And Tiago realized that he was probably the only thing June had to cling to right now.

He thought about that. The Doaq was hunting them. Nashara might be dead, a victim of Kay’s machinations, just like Pepper. Tiago was going to have to run. Be on his own, again.

He thought of the contact, the compulsion he had to do what Kay wanted. It came from her voice, her posture, the way she could read him. And it wasn’t real. With her out of the room, he could struggle away, couldn’t he? All that was left was his fear. Fear of consequences.

Fear that she would track him down for betraying her.

But fear could be conquered.

“Nashara has a ship, an armed ship, she said, waiting for her. It’s called … the
Strainer
, or something like that,” Tiago said. Dock seventeen, he remembered Nashara saying. At the very end. But he wasn’t going to give that information up. And then he said something he never would have thought he could have dared. “Nashara came from the Xenowealth to rescue you. I think you should run for it and get aboard that ship, and get away from here.”

And maybe, just maybe, Tiago thought, he could get aboard with him.

“Can you help me? Can you help me get there?”

“I could be trying to trick you,” Tiago said.

“I don’t care. I’ll take the chance. Wouldn’t you want to be under the protection of a Nashara? That’s like being protected by the whole Xenowealth. She’s important. She’s famous for the things she did. She’s a hero of the independence. I don’t want to be trapped here; I don’t want to get eaten by the Doaq or killed by Kay.”

Tiago found himself nodding with June. That was true. If Nashara hadn’t been killed by the Doaq, of course. They might have to convince her crew who they were if she was dead.

They might even turn the two of them away. That would be a disaster. Kay would find them pretty quickly after that, if they didn’t get on board.

Still …

“I think I can pick the lock on the window bars,” Tiago said. The houses shoved up against each other tightly enough that they could jump down to the red-tiled roof of the house next door.

“When do we go?” June stood up.

“Once the market fills up with people. That’ll make it easier. And once it is lighter out, we’ll be able to see if rains. We don’t want to get caught out if that happens.”

June’s eyes widened. He might be from Palentar, but he knew about the rain. “So in about an hour, or so?” he asked.

“Or so,” Tiago said. “I still need to pick the lock on the bars.” He reached into the seam of his pants, ripped at it, and slipped a few metal wires out.

He shouldn’t have attempted to smuggle them into Dekkan, if they’d been found he could have gotten into more trouble.

But he’d been too terrified to not get sent in there without something he might need.

Now he was grateful for that motivating terror.

“Go stand by the door,” he told June. “Warn me if you hear footsteps.”

For Kay sometimes it felt good to melt into a crowd. To walk around, anonymous, without the tendrils of power needing maintained and twitched. That itch in the back of her brain that insisted on decoding every intonation of voice, the sum of all one’s movements, the smell of a person, all that was overwhelmed by the crowd.

Maybe there were older versions of her kind that could manipulate an entire crowd. Maybe she could, one day, she mused.

But for now, she was a drop in the sea of human activity and bustle, slipping here and there as she made her way across the square, the sun hot on her face.

She’d secured the asset. She’d seen promise in the pickpocket. The Doaq had been frustrated yet again, and soon she’d find out whether Nashara had done it any damage.

There were new weapons already being handed out to the Ox-men that Nashara had delivered in those wooden packing crates, as part of the deal.

And Kay had a super weapon. A small nuclear weapon. Large enough to destroy three miles of the entire island. And the Doaq with it.

Kay had limited access to the worlds of information outside of Placa del Fuego. She’d been free of Okur for two years. She’d barely understood what the worlds outside Okur were when she’d first landed on the docks of Placa del Fuego.

She sure as hell hadn’t understood what a wormhole was, and had screamed the first time a ship sailed through one, thinking it was a portal to the afterlife.

Ignorance.

She’d been a mewling infant before all this.

Worse. She’d been a tool. An empty mind to be wielded by Lord Sassamich and his entire flock. She’d been little more than a well-trained dog, she thought as she paid the fare to ride a cable car toward the Back Circle. A dog to shepherd all the other human animals on the Sizit estate.

Today she’d faced down someone powerful. One of the great manipulators of the Forty-Eight worlds. Nashara herself. Kay smiled. She’d played it right. With this bomb she would rule the island. Not just the criminal underworld, which had been the slow and bloody struggle she’d set herself on for the last two years.

No, she’d turn this island into a fortress of safety, with herself deeply ensconced at the very heart of it. And she could maybe finally relax.

Her moment of calm and release faded when she approached the current headquarters. She’d remained here a bit long, three days instead of her usual two.

But she liked the pit in the basement. That had worked really well with Nashara.

She saw the miasma of fear and nervousness on the spotters outside as she walked up the road. They were supposed to look like they belonged on the street out here, but almost everyone had a weapon.

“You all might as well be holding signs that say ‘Criminal Operation Inside’ the way you are acting,” Kay hissed. She cornered one of her lieutenants. “Hide those weapons, and get them to calm down, damn it.”

The moment she stepped inside, a wide-eyed Runner, towering over Kay by what seemed like several feet, rushed over. “Bakeem sends you a note from the lookout position at the end of Tracy Street.”

The Runner half bowed and presented Kay with a hastily scrawled note. She reeked of sweat, Kay thought, and the note she’d handed over was crumpled.

Kay smoothed it out on a table.

“You were there?” she asked. “With Bakeem?”

The runner nodded. Her eyes were still wide. “The Doaq attacked. It is after you, ma’am. One of the Runners heard it demand your location from an Ox-man still alive on the lower floor. Then he leapt out the window and ran on a broken leg to us.”

“Bakeem stayed at the lookout?” Kay asked. He should have come back, or be following behind the Runner.

But the Runner blinked. “Bakeem’s dead,” she said. “I heard the Doaq attack the lookout even as I ran.”

Kay leaned on the table. That news shouldn’t have hurt. But it did. She’d gotten close to Bakeem, she realized. Close enough to care a little.

“Did you see it with your own eyes,” Kay demanded.

“No, I ran, and I didn’t look back. But …”

“Then we don’t know, do we, for sure?” Kay muttered, and threw the note to the ground. The Runner said nothing, just stood there, waiting to see if Kay had more orders. Kay shook her head. “Go. Leave.”

The Doaq would be here shortly, she realized.

All her carefully laid plans crumbling, Kay made her way down to the basement. She’d been careful to remain a puppet master, but the Doaq had figured her out.

Maybe it had caught and figured out how to torture the information out of Nashara. Maybe Nashara had just done it out of spite before dying.

Or maybe Nashara was alive. But if so, where was she?

Kay shook her head. No, it was probably one of her people it had caught. Kay crossed the length of the basement and stopped. “Jerome.” She called one of the armored-vest-wearing Ox-men over. “Bakeem’s dead.”

The Ox-man regarded her with a placid gaze. “At the look out?” he asked in his in his sparse, simplified way. “Who?”

“The Doaq did it. It’s looking for me.” Kay watched his reaction. The Ox-man expressed sorrow with a slight slump of his shoulders, and then a bit of dull anger, and resolve.

Perfect.

“You’re my Number One now,” Kay told Jerome. “The Doaq will be coming, and it’s time to set up the welcome Bakeem and I planned for it. How long do you need?”

Jerome unconsciously brushed at the shaggy hair all around his face as he thought. So freaking slow, Kay thought. But reliable. And strong. And brave to a fault. “It began already. Runners said the Doaq comes. I prepare.”

“Well done,” Kay smiled. “Then send everyone out.”

Jerome nodded, looked around the room, and shouted, “
Out
!”

Ox-men, Runners, and other guards all walked out, occasionally glancing back at her as they did so.

Once they’d all left, Kay crossed to the piled up wooden crates at the back of the basement. Nashara’s gifts. Most of them had been pried open, their contents distributed. Rocket launchers, high-powered machine guns, explosives, and other goodies.

Only one crate remained untouched.

“Hello,” Kay said, running a hand over the top of it.

She’d risked a lot for this.

She sat down on top of the crate, removed a knife and an apple, and began to methodically cut slices off.

The sound of gunfire began in the distance. Jerome and his Ox-men laying down fire against the Doaq. Several RPG rounds crumped into the street, shaking the walls. 

This had quickly turned into a mess, hadn’t it?

Her hands shook. She put the knife and apple down, and faced the door as screams and shouts floated from nearby houses. She’d been too focused on trying to grow her little empire. Too focused on fighting the biggest fight. Too attached to Placa del Fuego. Now it would all be ripped away.

A tear surprised her, and she rubbed it off her cheek with a fingertip. She looked at the liquid. Where did you come from? She wondered. It had been a long time.

If it was death that came, she told herself, wiping her fingertip on her trousers, it was a delayed one. One that sniffed and hunted her down in the sands of Okur. The one that that tried to devour her in the refugee camps.

She had lived and thrived for two years. It was two years more than anyone she’d once thought of as her family had been given.

The door to the basement opened, and the Doaq stooped to step through.

Kay watched the eyes deep inside the burnt, frayed cowl. Jerome had fought hard. But in the end, as they’d both known, the Doaq was still standing here.

The Doaq’s jaw did not drop to the ground to reveal that maw to hell. It just … regarded her.

Well, now, this was a game Kay understood.

One hand still in her left pocket, she picked up the apple and bit into it. A large, juicy, messy chunk came off, and Kay started chewing. And watching.

I’m not scared of you, she thought. Because I know what is coming next. I am in control now. I am back.

She swallowed. Rotated the apple. Bit deeply into it again.

The Doaq hesitantly stepped forward.

“That’s far enough.” Kay pulled her left hand out of her jacket and showed the Doaq what was in it. The wired trigger that ran to the small nuclear bomb she was sitting on top of. “Stay right there.”

It looked at the columns, and then down at the floor it stood on. Just like Nashara, it understood exactly what it had walked into.

So it knew. And Kay knew.

And they were back to staring at each other.

Then it groaned – a deep and hideous sound, half corrupt machine and half alien vowels that sounded like nothing at all human. But there was a question behind it, and when it finished, it stared expectantly at her.

“I am Kay. You are?”

The Doaq flicked one of its hands, and a leaf of metal fluttered through the air to land at the wood near Kay’s folded feet.

She put down the apple and picked it up.

It was a silvered business card. Like the ones the rich folk in the Greenhouse districts traded back and forth.

Printed in simple block letters was: D.o.Acq.

Kay didn’t understand. But she pocketed it anyway. “So you are the Doaq.”

It gave a half bow of agreement.

“You understand your position here, correct?” Kay asked it. “It isn’t just a pit you are standing over and charges in those columns pointed at you, but it is also that I am sitting on a nuclear bomb large enough to destroy both of us, and a third of Placa del Fuego.”

She stood up and kicked the cover of the crate open, then stepped aside. An invitation for the alien to see for itself.

It seemed to stretch taller for a moment, peering into the crate, then the shadows it cast shrunk back and the Doaq returned to its normal height.

The sleeves and skeletal fingers fluttered, and it tossed another metal card toward the crate with a puff of silver dust.

Carefully Kay picked it up while facing the Doaq.

“Not … fully nuclear,” Kay read out loud softly. “Dirty bomb.”

Her lips dried.

No.

The Doaq did not look triumphant. But its posture had changed slightly. More relaxed, Kay thought, mind working overtime.

Which was bad. Really bad.

But it hadn’t moved on her.

“It’s not a real nuclear weapon,” she said. “Nashara just packed some radioactivity around a complex-looking weapon to satisfy my tests. But it’ll still sting, won’t it?”

The Doaq nodded and stepped forward. It presented another silvered card, carefully laid on the floor between them, then backed away.

Kay could see the words without picking it up. 

WHERE IS THE BOY?

“Why would I tell you that?”

Another card was presented.

THE LOCATION FOR YOUR LIFE.

Kay stared at it for a long moment, trying to decide if it spoke the truth. Unlike the humans she could read so well, it was alien. There were some common body postures, but it was only glancing knowledge. Imperfection.

The Doaq was no open book.

But this was a path out. It was a chance for life, when she’d resigned herself to dying.

“You’ve killed most of my people,” she said. “What happens next?”

It thought for a moment and conjured up another card.

LEAVE. OR I WILL COME FOR YOU. THIS ISLAND IS MINE, NOT YOURS.

For a moment Kay’s thumb hovered over the switch. Pure defiance rippled through her. This place did not belong to the alien.

But she slumped and looked down at the ground. “Market-square. The third brick house on the north side. Five seven six. In the top room.”

She tensed, waiting for the sudden presence of the Doaq to swoop toward her, for the necessity of plunging her thumb down, for ending it all.

But there was nothing.

The Doaq was gone.