Waybound (17 page)

The cabin was spacious with bucket seats lining the perimeter. It had been a ludicrous gamble on Micah's part, but the soldiers had left it unattended. The boat was dark aside from his rifle light, which he had detached to hold in his teeth. His head was buried in a panel as she approached.

She heard a snap. Micah tossed something to her—a black disc the size of a bottle cap with a tiny green light.

“ID tracker,” he said. “Toss it in the flux.”

Unable to steady her reeling mind, she robotically did as she was told and dumped the device overboard.

Micah adjusted the controls, then tossed his idiotic grin back at her like a grenade. “Strap in. This puppy's got muscle.”

He tweaked a few more dials. They heard raised voices from the nearby barge. How long until the Foundry soldiers returned?

Her brain finally popped into gear as his finger reached for the ignition switch.

“Stop!” she hissed. “The engine, it's too loud!”

His eyes widened. He knew she was right. They had heard the Sea Bullet rumbling from up on the bluffs. If they started it up now, they would be detected for sure.

“Wha…” He was starting to panic. “What do we do?”

“Get off this boat,” she said, using the wall for support.

“No way. This is our ticket out!”

“To where, Micah? We have no idea where we're going.”

“Anywhere is better than here,” he snapped.

“They'll find us. They'll kill us. They—”

She jolted as her whist snagged on a wall panel. With a couple of tugs, she freed it, and the panel opened silently. But as the folds of her whist slid away from it, she noticed that the panel was, in fact, squeaking on its hinge.

The whist…

“Where's the engine?” she snapped.

Micah pointed to a row of vents slashing across the hood like the gills of a shark. Phoebe tore off her whist and reversed the material, so that the inside was facing out. She climbed out onto the hood, stuffed her shawl into the vents, and tied the corners off around rivets.

“Start it!” she ordered.

His jaw dangled open, but he understood.

He rushed back to the controls. She closed her eyes and prayed. Panel lights illuminated his face. The whist puffed a bit as if it were breathing. The Sea Bullet vibrated to life.

And the engine was silent.

Phoebe climbed back into the cabin as the boat leapt into action. Micah whipped the wheel and narrowly avoided crashing into the bluffs. The Sea Bullet sliced through the flux, quiet as a breath.

Phoebe curled up in the back of the cabin and shut her eyes, her innards churning like magma.

Lost in nausea, she didn't see a floor panel ease shut.

Nor did she notice the pair of eyes that had been watching.

“B
less yer embers,” Mr. Pynch purred piously, counting his gauge. “Walk the Way, gentle pilgrims. Many thanks.”

The dim, rot-pox-ravaged tchurbs admired their newly purchased dynamos. Mr. Pynch and the Marquis bowed with great devotion as the family of mehkies departed into the night.

The two partners could suppress their giggles no longer.

“How many we got left?” Mr. Pynch snorted.

The Marquis sifted through their foil sacklet of counterfeit sungold dynamos.
Flash-flick-blinky.

“Nearly sold out!” he chortled. “Keep yer peeper peeled for another patch of ragleaf so we can fabricate some more.”

Having just left the village of Orkeyl with full bellies and pockets bursting with gauge, Mr. Pynch and the Marquis were jangling across the Arcs. The land bridges were abandoned and peaceful, aside from the occasional Foundry train rumbling below. The night was bright, lighting their path with a streaking starscape, and a brisk breeze mussed Mr. Pynch's frazzly hair.

He felt good—good and drunk.

Mr. Pynch drew the coiled decanter of viscollia from a flap in his overcoat, took a swig, then passed it to the Marquis.

The Arcs were a magnificent system of stratified ravines that ran from the Vo-Pykarons to the Inro Coast. Over countless epochs, vesper had reshaped this landscape in irregular patterns, leaving the basins staggered like giant stairways. The elements had also formed a network of natural bridges, a crisscrossed jumble of angular pathways interconnecting the ravines. Some were short enough to cross with a stride, and others ran for a thousand quadrits.

Mr. Pynch had always heard that the Arcs were one of the great wonders of Mehk, but to him it was just a pretty view stretching from one town of suckers to the next.

The Marquis flipped back his head and poured a slug of viscollia down his neck. He righted himself, shuddered, and returned the booze to his companion.

Flishety-flack.

“Indeed! Huzzah for the Great Engineer! May Her gears gyrate eternally and so on and so forth.” Mr. Pynch took a swig. “I pray Her popularity continues to swell, and that Her gullible followers remain profitous to us until the end of our cycles.”

The Marquis, who was no longer capable of walking a straight line, giggled silently with his fluttering opticle.

“Come!” Mr. Pynch guffawed. “I observate the Holkhei land bridge ahead. Perchance we can reach Durl by the rise and fleece another crop of blissful dundernoggins.”

They staggered from one land bridge to another, singing bawdy songs and telling the filthiest of jokes. Mr. Pynch chugged from the decanter as they wobbled across ribbons of ore.

“Who was that ill-forged scoundrel outside of Oolee? Y'know, the one with the hideous breed-mate?”

The Marquis scratched his head.
Blink-blunk?

“That be it! Smooth operator, she was. Remember the time we paid her with her own fraudulent currency?”

Mr. Pynch swallowed some more viscollia and flipped the flask back to his companion. The tall mehkan stumbled drunkenly over his own feet as he caught it.

Blinky-flasharoo-strobe-flickety-flick.

“By me matron's corroded rack and pinion, I nearly forgotted that one! How about the time I got stuck in that bore-hole and almost missed the ambush altogether?”

The Marquis sputtered viscollia with wheezing laughter, liquor spraying out the hole atop his neck like a geyser. He tossed the decanter back.
Strobey-blink-blunk.

“Oh, that was spectaculous, to be sure! The Vo-Pyks never seen such a conflagration! You hooked that Watchman goon right off his motorized transportator with yer bumbershoot—”

Flashy-stroble-dy!

“Then when I rolled away, you walloped his head clean off. POP! Oh, that was beee-ootimous!”

The Marquis was bouncing up and down he was so excited.

Glow-strobie-flash-blunk!

“Then that Micah boy blew another's face right in with his…”

A heavy silence sank the conversation. The rumble of an approaching train grew louder, chattering the little ore pebbles around their feet. Mr. Pynch's face folded in a sour grimace as he caressed his silk necktie, picking at the slipshod stitches.

Blinky-flash-flush-plop.

“So what? I don't care a modicum. It don't change the circumstancials. What did you have to go bring them up for anyway? We didn't owe them two bleeders nothing.”

The Marquis fixed his light on the ground.
Flick-flick.

Mr. Pynch gulped from the decanter and lobbed it to the Marquis with an irritated grunt. The toss was wide, and the distracted lumie almost didn't see it in time. He extended an arm to snag it, but the flask deflected off his hand and spiraled away. The Marquis took two stumbling steps to catch it.

Mr. Pynch tried to hold him back.

Too late. The lumie spilled over the edge of the bridge.

Mr. Pynch blinked boozily.

He staggered to the lip of the land bridge and looked over, steeling himself for the horrific sight of his partner shattered into grisly bits far below. Instead, he saw the Marquis dangling from a jutting lump of ore by the belt loop of his fancy trousers. He was fluttering his opticle in delirious laughter, suspended over the faint glint of train tracks far below.

Blink-blunky-flunk.

“Oh no. This most certainly DOES count as me saving yer life,” chuckled the balvoor as he lowered a mitt to haul his friend up. “If it wasn't for me—”

A train roared. Pebbles danced. The jutting ore cracked.

The Marquis fell.

Mr. Pynch's smile fell with him.

The Marquis's opticle blasted a blinding shriek. He crunched atop an open train car of granulated ore. His opticle snuffed out like a candle.

Mr. Pynch stared openmouthed at the blur of train cars below as they sped off into the night.

Dollop knew he shouldn't have eaten that calefactus, but he had been starving. It was only now that his body felt tingly and numb, like his parts were all detached, that he seemed to recall that calefactus was poisonous. Or was that tulum?

Either way, his core was pumping irregularly, and his head buzzed like it was full of zurdyflies.

And he was exhausted. Dollop had been searching for so long that the jungle had given way to a swamp. Skeletal growths drooped low and erupted in scythe-like fronds. Vesper gathered in bubbling, muck-skinned pools, and fetid orange mist clung to the night. Dollop knew he wouldn't last long out here. He didn't know how to make a terra shelter, or how to purify corrupted vesper, or anything.

With shaking hands, he tried the salathyl prong once more.

But no one was coming to save him. Dollop knew that now.

He retrieved the prong with a heavy sigh.

Poor Loaii. Poor Micah. What had become of them?

“M-Mother of Ore,”
he began to pray, but then stopped himself. She wasn't coming to rescue him now either. The Great Engineer only helped those mehkans who could help themselves.

He continued to trudge through the stinking dreariness of the swamp with his gut roiling. That calefactus was really making him woozy.

Dollop tripped, and a musical tone sang out. He turned, and his arm grazed something, causing an even brighter note to ring.

It was a twisting black strand stretched between two trunks, hidden in the foliage. A nauseating familiarity clawed at him, a sense that he had been here before.

Terror seized him—this was a bad place.

Dollop bolted. He barely made it two steps before he was clotheslined by another concealed black thread and knocked off his feet. A cheerful chord of three notes mocked his cry of shock.

He was surrounded by an intricate web of musical trip wires. The lines ran along the ground and stretched down from branches. He could barely move without hitting the strands.

A shadow whispered past overhead.

Its name spread through his mind like a disease.

Vaptoryx.

Dollop had no memory of encountering one, yet he was overcome with vivid sensations, things he knew but could not have known. He could feel the slick mucus coating its supple black wings, hear the screeching clash of its needle-pointed legs, smell the hot rot of its snapping pincer maw.