His eyes went wide, then he fell forward onto me and the glass dagger. That pried-out rib snapped under the levering, and I screamed. Everything went black.
Soaking Room Floor
WHEN I WOKE UP, WARCRY, Biggerstaff, and the distiller lady from the Smoking Dragon were standing over me. Fire burned through the holes in my chest and side like they were all being cauterized at once. I arched my back and yelled through gritted teeth as the tissues closed.
“There you go,” the distiller said. She corked a bottle and shoved it into the pocket of her jeans. “That’ll be seven hundred twenty credits.”
“For that little teaspoon?!” Warcry gaped in disbelief.
Biggerstaff didn’t bat an eye. “Bill it to my account. Mr. Hake will pay me back.”
The distiller shrugged and left the soaking room.
A little at a time, the searing pain in my stab wounds died down. I started to breathe again, then sat up. The punctures were closed, but the rest of my body felt like it’d been through a car wreck without a seatbelt. Maybe my reaction to that elixir had given me whiplash. Or maybe it was just one of those things when somebody tried to kill you, like your whole body tensed up instinctively.
“You’re lucky Mr. Thompson found you when he did,” Biggerstaff said. “As you can probably guess from that price tag, those injuries weren’t minor.”
I glanced up at Warcry. “Thanks, man.”
The redhead crossed his arms over his chest, muscles twitching and jumping like they were agitated.
“I bleedin’ told you not to kill him, didn’t I?” he growled.
The Ylef was lying off to my side, on his back, cloudy gray cat-eyes staring up at the ceiling. Blood soaked his shirt, but not as much as you’d expect on a dead guy.
Because it was my blood, I realized, and he’d been piled on top of me. Blood didn’t run uphill. If a coroner looked the Ylef over, there wasn’t going to be a mark on him to say how he’d died. Dead Man’s Hand was all internal.
Fingers snapped near my face, and I flinched.
“Stick with us,” Biggerstaff said, crouching in front of me. “I’ve got the bodies of three formerly very promising recruits on my hands and a Shogun to answer to. Tell me what happened here, and get it right the first time, or your body gets dumped in the bogs along with theirs.”
Water splashed as a janitor pulled the green-blooded fighter’s body out of the rock pool closest to the door. Bloody water sloshed across the stone tiles.
“Three?” I frowned, trying to get my brain to catch up. The newly healed injuries in my side screamed when I twisted around to get a better look at the rest of the soaking room. Another naked fighter was lying on the tiles at the other end of the room, a bloody gash gaping under his chin like a second mouth.
I looked down at the Ylef again. He looked shocked. Surprised I’d killed him? Or surprised I’d gotten through that glass barrier?
“Oi, grav,” Warcry growled. “Ain’t really the time for daydreaming, yeah? Get your head on.”
“Huh?” I blinked, then remembered I was supposed to be explaining. I scrubbed my hands down my face. “Right. It was the Bailiff. The Ylef said the Bailiff sent us his congratulations.” My voice sounded hollow. Was I talking weird? I looked at the body the janitor was dragging out onto the floor. “I think he killed those other guys, too, but he was after us. Warcry and me.”
“So you killed him,” Biggerstaff said.
“No, I—I mean, yeah—” My brain felt like it was short-circuiting.
Biggerstaff’s fish eyes narrowed. “You’re saying this Ylef attacked you because of a small-time feud with some former backwater gangster?”
“That’s what he told me!” It probably wasn’t smart to yell at the guy trying to decide whether or not to execute me and dump my body in a bog, but the anger at not being believed hit me out of nowhere.
“Nameless trash.” Warcry spat on the Ylef’s corpse.
“Don’t do that!” I snapped. What the heck was wrong with him? With everything? This was all too real and too surreal to make any sense.
“Don’t you bleedin’ tell me what to do with an assassin, grav. He deserves it. Nameless’ll do anything for a name. The Bailiff probably didn’t even have to pay the cack-handed bastard.”
“Your expertise isn’t required here, Mr. Thompson,” Biggerstaff said, like he was dismissing Warcry.
A wave of cold hit me, and I started shivering.
“Think I’m gonna leave me lad here by himself while you slippery coves turn this around on him?” Warcry grabbed a towel off the rack and chucked it at me. “Internal alchemy, grav.”
At his reminder, I checked to make sure the little bit of Miasma regulating my internal alchemy was still cycling, but it was running like it was supposed to. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t get warm.
I dried off my upper body, then got up and wrapped the towel around my waist. Goosebumps stood out on my wet skin, and I had a long, puckered scar down my chest and a trio of triangular pocks in my side. Hopefully my insides had healed into less of a mess.
Biggerstaff’s whiskers twitched like they were feeling around for something.
“I’d heard that you and Sedryk Nameless recently had a dispute over some stolen property,” he said.
“You think I’d kill a dude just because he stole my boots?”
“People have killed for less,” the catfish said. “Petty off-planet murders keep Van Diemann’s population booming.”
Warcry let out an angry grunt, then crouched down by the Ylef and started rifling through the dead guy’s HUD. In a couple seconds, he twisted the Ylef’s wrist around, pointing the screen at Biggerstaff.
“Right there in black and white,” Warcry
