Rali was sitting cross-legged on one of the boulders with his new walking stick across his lap.
“Hey, guys.” He waved.
My shields dropped, and the used Miasma disappeared into Reclaiming the Dead breathing.
I clutched my hammering heart. “Dude, you just jump-scared ten years off my life.”
He grinned. “My deepest apologies, Death cultivator.”
“Rali!” Sushi cried, swimming circles around his shaggy head.
“Good to see you, too,” he said, trying to get her to hold still long enough to pet her. When she wouldn’t, he laughed and hopped down to the ground beside Warcry and me.
“Grady, Warcry!” Sushi’s fins shook with excitement. “We didn’t lose Rali!”
“No, you didn’t lose me. I was with Kest all along,” he told her.
The little fish was too giddy to listen. “Sushi sees Rali in the Lost Mirror, but Rali’s back!”
She nuzzled into the side of his face, and he finally got to pet her.
Rali turned to me, his eyes sparkled with that manic otaku light. “Did you guys just ride a flying sword up a mountain?”
I couldn’t hold back the laugh. Of course he had seen that.
“Yeah, and it was exactly as much fun as you’d imagine.”
“I’m experiencing some very un-Warm Heart feelings of jealousy right now. Where’d you get a flying sword? Did you stumble onto another ancient cultivator’s stash, or did you have to go on a quest and slay a dozen demons to recover it?”
All the fun drained away when I realized how close to the truth that second guess was. I glanced down at the dark base of the boulder, trying to come up with an evasive answer that wasn’t super obvious.
Fat Selken already knows and is judging Death cultivator, Hungry Ghost croaked from inside his prison. How else would he know you killed twelve Technols for the sword?
Scowling, I dumped a landslide of Jealous as the Grave on top of him. I really needed to add “keep Hungry Ghost buried six feet deep” to the constant upkeep my internal alchemy took care of.
When I refocused on the world outside my head, Sushi was resting on Rali’s shoulder, chattering his ear off about jungle centipedes and Broken Mirror Spirit. Rali nodded and pretended like he was listening, but he was staring at me. Even in the dark, I could see the black lace patterns in his eyes shifting. Could he tell I had used a bunch of Miasma even though he didn’t have a Spirit sea anymore, or had I just been standing there too long without saying anything?
When the little fish paused her story long enough to take a breath, Rali said, “You look different, Hake.”
“Taller?” I said hopefully.
Rali gave me the kind of noncommittal grunt that I usually made when I didn’t want to answer somebody. Turns out that’s actually pretty annoying.
Luckily, Warcry was there to fill in the awkward silence.
“Ah, ya big blighter.” He nailed Rali in the arm. “You saw us coming in for a landing and decided to sneak up on us, did ya?”
Rali chuckled and rubbed what was probably going to be a bruise before long.
“You two were so focused on the Technol’s little quick-up city over there that I couldn’t resist. Actually, I come down to the river a lot to get away from camp. The roar of the rapids blocks out the constant drone of those generators, and the wind off the falls carries away the fumes of industry so you can breathe again. Almost.” He looked us up and down. “Given the lack of forewarning, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you aren’t in the area to take in the sights and sounds of the falls. Is this a hostile takeover?”
I shook my head. “Sanya-ketsu turned on us. She’s working for the Technols.”
Warcry and I gave Rali a rundown of the last twenty-four hours.
“So this isn’t sanctioned by the Dragon Emperor,” he said when we were done. “You’re making an autonomous decision to kill her for this artifact?”
Rali probably meant plural “you” as in “both of you,” but he looked at me when he said it.
“Kest told you about Sentenced to Death,” I said.
He shrugged. “We’re twins.”
“And you don’t think that killing Sanya for what she did to the guys on the artifact team is better than killing for money?”
“I’m saying this is the solution you came to after a few weeks of Death Spirit for hire. Not talking to her. Not incapacitating her and taking the bracelet back. Killing her.”
I scowled at the shiny flecks in the boulder behind him. How did we always come back to this?
“You understood in the Heartchamber,” I said. Back then, Rali had said that he got that sometimes you had to shoot to kill when your friends’ lives were on the line. “Sanya knows Kest is spying for the Dragons. If she can turn on the artifact team, then she can turn on you and Kest.”
He flicked his shaggy hair out of his face with a jerk of his head. “But you don’t know that she will. You’re condemning her for a crime she might commit.”
“No, I’m condemning her for murdering three guys who thought she was on their side and stopping her before she has a chance to do something worse.”
“But if you start thinking about it like that, like everyone’s always about to do something worse, suddenly you’ve got a whole universe of potential criminals on your hands. Which ones do you preempt, and which ones do you give a chance to actually do something bad before you kill them?”
He wasn’t getting it.
“Do you want me to wait until she’s got a gun to your head?” I snapped. “I don’t know if you remember, but that almost went bad when I did it for Warcry on the executioner’s block.”
“You’re playing right into their expectations, Hake.” Rali shook his head at me. “Becoming exactly what they want you to become—an indiscriminate Death machine.”
“They who?”