Biggerstaff glanced at the screen. “Pictograms?”
“Nameless can’t read, can they?” Warcry sneered, like that was something everybody knew.
“I’ll need to have someone check the translation,” Biggerstaff said, turning back to me, “but for now, it looks like you’re telling the truth. Let’s talk about why you didn’t cloak your Spirit during your match, but did in here.”
My eyebrows jumped. “What?”
“I didn’t feel your Miasma when you attacked, and I’ve been monitoring you. You cloaked yourself somehow when you killed him.”
I thought back to the Moldering Bones attack Hungry Ghost had shot into my head.
Did you cloak my Spirit when I attacked? I asked.
Some kills require privacy, Hungry Ghost said.
“Focus, Mr. Hake,” Biggerstaff snapped. “Why didn’t you use the Spirit cloak in your match?”
“I...I didn’t know how to then. It just happened when he attacked me.”
“Can you recreate it during your next fight without killing anyone?”
The shivers hit me again, so intense that it was almost hard to breathe.
“Maybe,” I said, scrubbing my hands together and ramping up the internal alchemy some more, trying to get warm.
“Do it. No maybes. Get it done, and this—” He jerked his wide catfish head at the bodies lying around the floor like dirty laundry. “—including the price of that healing elixir, will all go away, no matter what the pictogram translation says.”
Flames erupted down Warcry’s head and shoulders. “You callin’ me a liar, fish?”
Calmly, Biggerstaff turned to the redhead and opened his huge predatory fish mouth like he was sucking down dinner, gill rakers flashing.
Just like that, Warcry’s fire was snuffed out.
The redhead’s face twisted into a mask of fury, and he whispered, “What did you do, you—”
“Don’t ever flex on me, Mr. Thompson,” Biggerstaff interrupted in a low voice. “An Antimatter affinity is no one you want to make an enemy of. The next time you raise your voice to me with an attack in the chamber, you’d better be prepared to finish me immediately or lose every trace of Spirit in your body.”
With that, he slid his hands into his pockets and walked out, fancy shoes tapping on the stone tiles.
As soon as the catfish was out of sight, red fire flared up again all over Warcry. The ginger glared down at his burning fists like he was trying to make sure nothing was wrong with them, then he let the flames drop.
The janitor squeezed between us, dragging the naked fighter by the ankles. The dead dude’s elbow bumped the Ylef’s boot as it passed and shook the whole bony body.
For a second, I felt Dead Man’s Hand bump against that glass wall like it was my real fingers grabbing at the life point. I leaned over with my hands on my knees, dry heaves kicking up a storm in my gut.
“How about ya, grav?” Warcry asked.
“Fine,” I croaked. I straightened up and cleared my throat. “We’ve got to stop the Bailiff.”
“We do, yeah?” Warcry eyed me. “You look well fit for the job, trying to hold your guts down.”
“It might not be me or you he goes after next time! It might be Kest or Rali or...or...” I cussed under my breath, furious with myself. “If I’d gone ahead and killed that jerk at the Wilderness Territorial, this would never have happened.”
“I don’t want the netskins dead any more than you do, but we’re talking a proper psycho here,” Warcry said. “The Bailiff’s already got the Big Five affiliation he was always barking about, and he still hired some Nameless to do us. That’s a different class of lunatic.”
“Listen, if we can sneak up on him, grab his life point when he’s not expecting it—he doesn’t have a protection around it like the Ylef did—I can take him out. I just need to figure out the cloaking, then he’ll never see me coming.”
“What you need is a head examination,” Warcry said. “You’ve cracked.” He grabbed my wet clothes and work boots out of the puddle of bloody water and slammed them into my chest. “Piss off outta here before anybody else comes around and sees a mad half-naked Death cultivator standing over a bunch of stiffs, ranting about murdering some Jianjiao cove.”
I bit off my arguments, realizing my breathing was coming a lot harder than it should’ve been. I was right on the verge of hyperventilating.
I spun around and strode out of the soaking room, digging my hand into the dripping pocket of my jeans.
My fist closed around the cold little lump of Hungry Ghost.
I can’t mess around anymore, I told him. I need that cloaking.
Death cultivator is ready, the skull stone croaked. Hungry Ghost will teach him.
Out in the market court, I headed for the elevators, barely registering that people were staring at me. I needed dry clothes, then I needed bog ferals.
Finding Oblivion
BY THE TIME I MADE it outside, the orangey-magenta tinge from the night sun was starting to creep into the far corner of the gray cloud cover. For once, the constant rain had tapered off into a cool mist that felt like occasional little pinpricks of wet on my skin.
Bands of ferals had accumulated since I’d been inside, and several of them were beating at the brick walls of the Heartchamber. One even slammed repeatedly into the door like it knew instinctively that the steel rectangle was how you were supposed to get in, even though it couldn’t figure out the handle.
To clear the makeshift training area, I took those out with Dead Man’s Hand, tearing out their life points and supercharging my Spirit sea.
The next closest pack wasn’t going to be much of a challenge in a physical fight. There were only three of them, and one was sort of gallop-dragging itself along on two arms and part of a leg, ragged chew marks at the end of each limb. A gross reminder that ferals weren’t picky about what they ate. If there wasn’t any
