“Let’s get a move on, yeah?” he said.
After a quick check of the Heartchamber location marker on our HUDs, we left the station and headed northeast out of town, taking the boardwalk until it ran out. The water there came up to our waists. In spite of the icy rain, that open water was fairly warm.
Outside the little settlement, mats of tall, tufted grass floated on top of the water. The stalks stretched up over our heads high enough that we couldn’t see any landmarks, and rain clouds blocked out the day suns, so there was no way to tell from the landscape which direction we were going. We had to keep checking the arrows in the corner of our HUD maps to make sure we weren’t getting off track.
The lack of visibility above and below the water was kind of creepy. The grass mats seemed to be muffling all sound, and I swore I felt stuff bumping against my legs from underneath.
I looked over at Kest. “Are there any, like, alligators or creek carp or things that like to eat people here?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve got my Fish Finder on. That should give us some warning if anything the size of a carp or larger gets close.” She put the storage ring to her forehead and said, “Machete.”
A long-bladed homemade machete appeared in her hand, and she started hacking away at the mat of grass in front of her. The roots tore free of each other with a sound like a zipper unzipping.
“We need to go this way, but the grass mats grow in that direction,” she said, swiping some rain out of her eyes with her wrist. “I’ll cut, you guys shove.”
“Got it.”
“What about poisonous reptiles?” Warcry asked, shoving aside an unzipped grass mat. “Van Diemann got any of them?”
Kest shook her head. “There aren’t any native poisonous reptiles on Van Diemann that I know of.”
Warcry relaxed and nodded. I hadn’t been thinking about snakes and stuff before he’d brought them up, but hearing that they weren’t something to worry about made me feel better, too.
“Only venomous,” Kest said, and this time she wasn’t trying to hide her grin.
Rali chuckled and shoved some grass aside with his walking stick. “Classic.”
“You dorks,” I muttered, smiling.
Warcry scowled. “Long as they ain’t bigger than a creek carp, they shouldn’t be a problem.”
The twins looked at each other, then looked away like they didn’t want to answer him.
The redhead stopped slogging through the grass. “That ain’t funny! There better not be any giant snakes out here!”
“To tell the truth, I don’t know how big they get out here in Bogland,” Kest said. “Most of the snake and lizard population in the Rust Flats was wiped out by overconsumption, and what little survived doesn’t usually make it to adulthood before somebody kills and eats it. But nobody settles this far out, so in theory, whatever sort of reptiles live out here could grow as big as their body’s regulation system would allow.”
Warcry started scanning every clump of grass before he shoved it aside. I did the same, because jeans and a T-shirt didn’t seem like they would do much to protect me from snake fangs, whether they were giant or normal-sized.
Bog Ferals
EVENTUALLY THE WATER and grass mats tapered off until we were slogging through wet, marshy mud. The only vegetation there were these sticklike reeds growing out of irregular clumps that stuck up like little hills. You either had to wind around the clumps or step up onto them and then back down into the muck to keep going in a straight line. It was exhausting, and every now and then one of us would sink up to our nads in a watery mudhole we hadn’t seen coming.
The good news—for me, anyway—was that so many creatures and people and plants had died in the bogs over the centuries that the Death Spirit hung in the air like fog. With a little bit of Swallowing the Universe breathing, my Spirit sea was full to bursting in no time.
Out of curiosity, I checked my stats on my HUD.
Name: Grady Hake
Spirit: Death
Height: 5'7"
Weight: 142 lbs
Age: 16 Van Diemann years (current location), 14.4 Universal years
Credits: 0.5
Spirit Reserve: 6,986
Pretty incredible, considering a month ago I’d had exactly nine Spirit and my sea could barely hold the eighteen hundred needed for my quota to the OSS.
In my pocket, Hungry Ghost was sucking down the Miasma, too, the turquoise strings of Death Spirit creeping across the marshy land toward it. Only I could see his effect on the world around me, because I was his accepted Death cultivator. It was sort of a safety measure to keep the little skull stone from being stolen.
I let my HUD arm drop and caught up to everybody else.
We’d just crossed into a thigh-deep stretch of muddy water when the muck a few yards in front of us shifted and rippled. A sound like gargling bubbled up from underneath.
“Swamp gas?” Warcry guessed.
It definitely stank bad enough to be the fumes from decomposition, even with the downpour beating it back.
Rali frowned. “This doesn’t feel natural.”
A mud-stained arm broke the surface.
Before we could run for it, a dozen rotting bodies jumped up out of the bog around us like a movie ambush of bandits dropping out of the trees...except up. Their skin was stained the same dark brown as the muck, even the one that had been a shark alien back when it was alive. Soupy mud dripped from their mouths as they gargled it out, groaning and grunting like the ferals from the Rust Flats.
For about half a second, no one moved.
Then the shark feral broke into a sprint toward us, rooster tails of muddy water flying up on either side. With a mindless howl, the rest of the pack followed.
Instinctively, I threw out Dead Reckoning and sloshed through the bog to intercept the shark. As I ran, I pumped Miasma into both
