“And more,” I interrupted in that hollow voice. Nobody’d asked me to kill a bunch of Dragons.
“—and you say you lot can’t trust him?”
“Probably because of the more,” I said.
Warcry glared at me, then turned back to Biggerstaff. “He ain’t takin’ nothing ’til we’ve seen a full ingredients list.”
Rali spoke up. “Where are you planning on taking him, anyway?”
The whole thing felt scripted, like Biggerstaff wanted us to react this way and that was why he’d phrased it so vaguely in the first place. I was too done with everything by then to keep reading the lines.
So I grabbed the pill out of Biggerstaff’s hand and popped it in my mouth.
“Hake, wait!” Rali jumped out of his seat. At the same time, Warcry yelled, “What’re ya doin’, ya bleedin’ clown?”
Black nothingness closed in around me. No dreams. No sensation. Just nothing.
Which was exactly what I’d wanted.
Rise and Shine
SOMETHING SHARP STABBED me in the arm.
I was lying on the softest bed I could remember ever sleeping on. The light hurt my eyes, and I had to blink a bunch before I could keep my eyelids cracked. I squinted at my surroundings.
A woman in geisha robes knelt beside me on a wooden platform built around the bed. She capped a syringe and slipped it into her sleeve, then got up and turned to go.
I pushed up onto my elbows.
“Wait.” My voice sounded hoarse, like I hadn’t used it in a long time. “Where am I?”
She didn’t look back, just picked her way down a set of wooden steps into the room and disappeared around a corner. A door opened and closed.
And locked.
Something warm trickled down my arm from the needle hole, and I realized my entire arm was burning. When I looked, there was way more blood than there should have been. Dark red smears of it covered the skin, all the way down past my elbow and up my bicep. They branched off in places and spread out almost like claws.
That mental image of claws was what finally made it click into place. What I’d thought was blood was actually a healing script tattoo. I lifted my arm up and turned it over, inspecting the dark red ink. A dragon with eight legs, its scaly feet digging hooked claws into my skin.
Biggerstaff had said they couldn’t let me wake up until they were sure I would cooperate. I wondered whether this tattoo was tied to a script remote like my OSS tattoo had been. Then I thought if they were smart, the script remote would be connected to one of my friends. Like Hungry Ghost had said, that was the best way to jerk me around.
The eight-legged dragon healed the needle hole in no time, but the burning in my arm didn’t stop. I felt something twinge in my messed-up left side, but the knots around the knife scars didn’t come free. Whatever was wrong there, the script tattoo was having trouble healing it.
My clothes were folded and waiting for me on the platform. No work boots or even my old worn-out sneakers from Earth, so I was back to square one on the shoe situation.
I swung my legs out of bed and just sat there for a second, trying to get my bearings.
The room was done up in blue-grays and sandy colors with lots of weathered gray wood. There was a low table surrounded by seating cushions in the corner, a minifridge, and even a projection wall with a holoscreen remote. On one wall, a door hung open, revealing a huge bathroom with half a dozen shower heads and even a little bubbling fountain spitting water and incense.
Every amenity you could imagine, but no windows.
Because it’s a jail cell, I thought. A really nice jail cell, but still a jail cell.
I got dressed and headed around the corner the geisha had taken.
There was a short hall, with the locked door at the far end. The door that looked like it was made of the same weathered driftwood everything else in here was, but when I tried it, it was solid.
My work boots were there, on a little mat next to the door. Sushi didn’t shimmer back into the visible spectrum and swim out of one, though. That worried me. The last thing I remembered, she’d hidden under a pillow in my room when Biggerstaff and his bruisers showed up. Hopefully, she had gotten out before the door shut, and she would go somewhere she could find bugs to eat.
I headed back into the main room.
I was locked up, but at least they had left me my Winchester. A look at the cracked screen showed me I had nine unread messages, all from Kest. She’d started out demanding to know what was going on and where we were, but the last few shifted to saying Warcry had explained and asking if I would message her when I woke up. The final one was dated a week after the Heartchamber massacre, today.
It’s going to be okay, she’d said. I’ve got a plan.
That sent a little lightning bolt of panic through the numbness.
I messaged her, Everything’s fine. Don’t do anything. Stay away.
She didn’t get back to me right away. I was still waiting for a reply when a fist clamped down on my Spirit sea. The lock on the door ca-chunked open.
A few seconds later, Biggerstaff and a group of those geishas came around the corner into the room. The way they fanned out around the catfish reminded me of the day he’d shown up in my room at the Heartchamber, except this time his rumble squad was made up of beautiful women instead of ugly hooligans.
Biggerstaff nodded to me. “Ready for your audience with the Shogun, Mr. Hake?”
Money in the Bank
“TURN AROUND,” BIGGERSTAFF directed without coming any closer. “Lace your fingers together behind
