Page 69 of Surfaces
“You aren’t helping her, you’re helping me,” Humberto argued. “I’m not trying to win…I just can’t get kicked out. I…need to stick around.” His voice caught.
Aww. He’s falling for Gita. Dammit all, I need a moment to find out the details from her—
“I’ll trade you.” The woman offered. “One needle in exchange for—”
“I’m a painter by trade. I can come back and paint tonight. Do up your entire room here.”
She snorted. “Paint? No. That won’t help me. I want your pants.”
Humberto started, drifting backward a few inches, arms flying protectively to his waistband. “My pants?”
“I know a guy who’ll buy them second-hand no questions asked.”
I slid away from the window in slow motion until I was two feet down the wall and out of sight. Then I made a horrified face for Ugo and Paavo. “Let’s go quickly. Idon’twant to find out how this ends.”
We shot through the water back to the mayor’s roof, where Sahar and Keelan both gave me a talking to for scaring them. The lectures were a welcome distraction from my visions of pantless Humberto.
The herald used his conch shell to announce time warnings to the competitors, so that all of them made it back to Gorgono’s rooftop before three. The first bellow shocked us all, but he did them in five-minute intervals, with announcements the final half hour—so by the end we were all either immune to or annoyed by the sound.
Radford and his group swam back a drunken, slovenly mess, having clearly spent their three hours at the tavern. Illia even had a lipstick mark on his collar, which would have pitched me into a rage at his downright disrespect, but to my surprise, Marea shot up out of her seat when she saw him and swam right over.
The silent wife of the mayor reared back and smacked Illia hard across the face, her orange and blue hand flicking so quickly it blurred.
I exchanged a startled glance with Keelan before Sahar leaned down and whispered in my ear. “Remember, I told you on the ride over…Illia is her sister’s nephew by marriage?”
I had not remembered that ridiculously banal detail. But I quite enjoyed it right now, as I watched Marea whisper shout Illia into shame.
She might not have stopped either, if the judge with the giant mustache hadn’t come forward, his gnarled old hand raised in an effort to defuse the tension as he asked, “Excuse me. But we have to score the results of each of the competitors. Have you managed to procure any of the three items?”
All four of them shook their heads—as I’d expected. The judge clucked his tongue and shook his head as he turned and swam back to his seat, to mark down big fat zeros on his little strip of parchment.
Good. We’d all get what we wanted then—separation—though, based on their glares, I’d made lifelong enemies of the four. Because that was what I needed. More enemies.
The herald lifted his conch shell and announced the names of four competitors who had not been able to find a single item. Polite clapping followed.
Keelan swam over, settling next to me once more, though his mother had forcibly prevented him from swimming out to the quarry. He gave a somber look in my direction as he said, “That right there is a pity clap for those fools.”
“Is there such a thing?” I asked, glancing around for Mr. Whelk.
“Of course. It’s got a very distinctive sound. An ‘I’m sorry you’re so stupid’ undertone.” He took my right hand and arranged it palm up underneath his. Then he made his wrist limp as he weakly clapped his good hand down onto mine. “Hear that? Terrible sound.”
I chuckled and then retracted my hand to point at the small room just off the roof. “You know what else will be a terrible sound? Gorgono’s yell when he finds Mr. Whelk eating all his food.”
Keelan turned to see his pet perched on the refreshment table, head buried in a serving dish of seagrass.
“Shite!” he exclaimed, swimming rapidly over to retrieve his miscreant pet.
The next competitor to arrive back was Watkins, who carried a horseshoe clutched in his hand. The dorsal fin he had even in human form was speckled with something—dirt or mud, I couldn’t tell what.
His black eyes were somber until he saw that some of the other men were empty-handed. Then his thick shoulders relaxed.
I gave the shark shifter a huge smile as the judge with the hanging mustache approached.
“I see you got one item. Care to tell us how you got it?”
“I asked around at the taverns. I found a local butcher who specialized in scavenged horse meat to agree to let me go through his trash.” He gave a shrug. “He let me, laughing the whole time, before he told me that he typically sold off the metal bits to a smithy. So, I went over there and got this. That’s why I only have the one item.”
The judge nodded, his whiskers wavering. “Understandable. Quite persistent though. Did you happen to deck the butcher?”
