“Didn’t seem quite right, did he, big man?” Warcry said, swiping neon green crumbs from his mouth. “Maybe he got away quick-like after the first bite.”
My Winchester’s alarm buzzed. I shut it off.
“How much time do we have left?” Kest asked, taking another sip from my Coffee Drank.
“Eighty-four hours,” I said.
We had three and a half days left to get to Heartchamber 2 before Warcry and I got dropped from the Eight-Legged Dragons, but I was still paranoid we’d miss the deadline, so I had set up an alarm on my HUD to go off every twelve hours and keep us on track.
“That should be plenty of time.” Kest swiped out of her schematics and pulled up a map. “We’re only two stops away from Bogland Station, and from there, it’s just a day’s walk to the coordinates Biggerstaff sent you guys.”
I nodded. “It just seems like that’s probably misleading, though. He wouldn’t give us four days to get somewhere if it was easy. Especially not if this is the Eight-Legged Dragons’ test to see whether we’re worth investing in.”
“We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” Warcry said, kicking his seat back and putting his boots up on the table. His metal prosthetic grated against the wood as he shoved bags of AlgaeFrize out of the way to make room.
Kest started to take another drink of my Coffee Drank, then stopped.
“This is yours,” she said, shifting in her seat to face me. “Sorry. I think I’ve been drinking out of it this whole time.”
I shrugged. “No big deal.”
“I’ll get you a new one out of the storage ring,” she said.
“Really, it doesn’t bother me.” I took the can from her and drank some to prove it. A little thrill shot through the pit of my stomach at drinking after her. I set the can back in the armrest. “I’m just sorry you had to drink after my slobber.”
She snorted. “That’s a really gross way to say that. And it wasn’t slobbery. I would’ve noticed.”
“I don’t think you would have,” I joked. “I mean, you didn’t even notice that your can was in the other armrest.”
She elbowed me, trying not to smile, then went back to researching components for her biotech arm.
Warcry’s idea for a nap looked like a pretty good one, so I leaned my seat back and shut my eyes. With the excitement from surviving the OSS’s attack at the tournament and getting an affiliation with the Eight-Legged Dragons, none of us had felt like sleeping the night before, and that all-nighter was catching up to me.
Instead of dozing off, though, I mostly thought about Kest. Her picking the seat next to mine when we got on the train. Laughing about drinking out of my Coffee Drank can instead of being grossed out. Showing me her plans for a new arm when she hadn’t shown anybody else yet.
Maybe she just did all that stuff because we were friends, but it would’ve been cool if she liked me, like as more than a friend.
Train Robbery
THERE WAS TOO MUCH caffeine rushing through my veins to sleep, and all that Coffee Drank had to go somewhere, so eventually I gave up on napping and headed to the next car back to use the bathroom.
I was opening the door of the little compartment when a cold, serrated green blade hooked over my shoulder and around my throat.
“Reach for the sky, and place your hands flat against the restroom door,” a flat, insectile voice said. “I won’t hesitate, human, so do not test me.”
I stuck my hands on the bathroom door, looking down at my feet. Between them, I could see green insect legs and a swaying abdomen. I was being held up by a gigantic praying mantis.
“Transfer all your credits to my HUD, human, and you will remain in a single piece. Nod if you will comply.”
“I’m broke, man,” I said. “My last twenty credits went to buy my train ticket.”
Slow clicking as he thought this through. “Then you will place all valuables and non-valuables on the floor and kick them behind your back to me. Nod if you will comply.”
I nodded.
“Begin,” he said.
“I have to take my hands off the door,” I said. “Otherwise I can’t empty my pockets.”
“Do so,” the praying mantis said, “but with only one appendage. Leave the other planted.”
In my pocket, I clamped my hand around Hungry Ghost, the little grinning skull stone that stored Death Spirit for me, then sent Miasma into my neck to reinforce my throat. If my practice sessions with Kest were any indication, my reinforcement wasn’t strong enough to keep this guy from sawing my head off, but hopefully my next move would stop him before he could do any major damage.
I reached out with Dead Man’s Hand and found the praying mantis’s amber life point flickering in his thorax like a candle. When I grabbed hold of that amber flame, the mantis let out a wheezing hiss.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s me. There’s no defense against it, and it can move a lot faster than your arm can. So, either get your arm off my throat or get ready to die.”
The scythelike arm unhooked itself and carefully pulled back.
I turned around. The mantis’s eyes were huge and yellow and made of four or five segments each like tectonic plates. With those and the mandibles, the dude looked more alien than even some of the weirdest aliens I’d seen over the past month. There was no indication of emotion or thought in his face, just this weird insectile blankness.
His dirty cowboy hat had tipped a little to the side, and underneath, I could see what looked like a ragged edge to the chitin on the side of his head. Maybe Rali hadn’t been wrong about this dude having a bite out of his brain.
“Get to the farthest train car possible from this one,” I told
