Page 5 of Odder Still
A shout interrupts him.
I freeze, tracking the sound to the edge of the jetty. Another call answers it as the fishing boats I noticed earlier careen around the side of the tall jetty to our left. They carry four people, all redheaded and freckled, but none of them Lilias. A huge bundle of nets writhes between the boats, pulling them toward the shore. One look at their haul and I know they’re not fishing for prey, but for predators.
Their captive orca’s black tail crashes down, white underbelly visible for a moment as it twists in the netting, snapping ropes along the edges. Green, blue, purple, and orange gashes cut across the creature’s body, outlining its ordinary black and white markings. As it tosses its head, its gums shimmer with rainbows between silver teeth. The same rainbows as the parasite’s in my neck.
Tavish holds his cane tighter. “What is it?”
“Poachers.” The word comes out as a hiss.
A wave pushes the orca’s tangled body onto the beach, wedging it against the sand. It writhes ferociously. The boats follow, their crews abandoning them to splash through the shallow water. They seem barely able to stop the beast from crushing them as it thrashes. One poacher draws out something that shines like death, half a harpoon and half an executioner’s blade. I tense. My ears ring with the squelch of Lilias’s heel tearing into my darling Blossom’s neck, crushing the life out of the pet caiman, the most loyal of my sweet triplets. My tension turns to pain. It pulses through me, making all my misery and worry smolder.
With a deep breath, I smother the feeling.
The orca is not my pet. This is not my world. I can’t stop this creature’s death, and the more time I spend mixing myself up in other people’s business, the more likely it becomes that the rest of my monstrous family will share its fate. If I engage with these poachers at all, it needs to be to get the parasite out of my neck, and my neck back south where it belongs.
As they toss more ropes over the shored orca, though, the parasite goes taut within the muscles of my neck. A surge of dismay and anger spills from it, flaring in tremendous waves that turn my mind hazy and make my heart pound—pound to a different rhythm, one controlled by a new drummer.
By the parasite.
CHAPTER THREE
The Difference Between Sinking and Falling
Each answer builds
a slow transformation.
Do I become less of myself with each new addition,
no longer a reflection, but a vague substitution?
IN SOME DISTANT LIFETIME, I sat across from Lilias on a wide, flat deck, the ignit cartel’s riverboat creaking as it drifted beneath the jungle canopy. Splotched, golden light filtered around us both. It was too lovely for the monster dubbed the Lily of the North, and she seemed to know it, drawing herself into the depths of her cowl.
Her loose, long-sleeved garments were river-made, but they looked out of place on her pale, freckled form. She picked at a hangnail with her favorite little knife, one whose blade I knew intimately. Her thin nose wrinkled.
“Pull apart the town until someone talks,” she said. “If no one there can point us toward the ignit hoard, then we’ll know by the end of tomorrow.” She didn’t so much as glance at the colorful, softly glowing, stonelike ignits cradled in the bowl at the table’s center—a vibrational blue, a heat-forming red, a green that would make the body die cell by cell—all currently in their inactive state.
The endlessly rechargeable energy they created could fuel a city’s infrastructure and a tyrant’s rise to power in equal proportion. They should have been enough for Lilias. But her ambition is a wild beast, rash and irregular. She wanted more, or she wanted their source—the auroras—and nothing less would satisfy.
“I’d prefer not to subject those people to the cartel’s brutality.” I scooped out the poisonous ignit from the bowl, flipping it between my fingers. Quaint, how the presently harmless stone could blister my skin and start me heaving with a single spark of electricity. “Give our scouts time.”
Lilias flipped her knife around, driving its blade into a crack in the wood. “Time is not a thing I have in surplus. Neither is patience.”
“I won’t trade your haste for bodies.” I gave the ignit another toss and a catch, wishing desperately for the box of wine I stashed below deck this morning.
“We’re in the business of bodies. Maybe you got to be a pacifist—” She snorted. “Or should I say anapathist, because you lived in the middle of gods-damned nowhere. But now you’ll be whatever the hell I ask of you if you don’t want me tearing apart your stick house and the barbaric swamp it sits beside.”
At the mention of my home, something small and hot burned inside me, something so very far from apathy. “Three more days.” I forced it out, the call of the wine pounding behind my ears. “You installed me here, let me do the job you gave me.”
“Counteroffer.” She leaned in. “I kill you and lead this cartel on a rampage through your Murk, pulling up every single aurora they possess.”
“Even you wouldn’t be so reckless. Maybe you can keep talking the river scum into helping you, but the Murk never will. They’ll have your bones on necklaces before you even figure out where their auroras are hosted.” I left the rest unspoken: that outside those living in the Murk, I’m the only one who can locate the auroras. No one else had a parent from both worlds, the knowledge of the Murk’s fog-laden swamps without their residents’ unwavering commitment to them. “Let me do my job,” I repeated, rolling the ignit across my knuckles and swiping it into my fist before it could fall. “I can get you what you want, and we can all leave happy.” And then I could escape Lilias’s mess for the bliss of not having to deal with cartels or crazed northerners or anything that walked on two legs and talked like this life owed it something.
My desire for that simple, old existence holds firm.
It grips me square in the chest now as I stand on this northern beach with the four poachers ahead and Tavish somewhere behind, but the aurora Lilias wanted so badly hits me with its anguished seething, brighter and more devastating than any emotion I could conjure for these orca killers. It pushes me, not toward my home, my life, my tucked-away corner of the world, but straight into their mess. I storm across the sand, propelled by such ragged waves of the parasite’s resentment that even my silence can’t stop the poachers from spotting me.
Once they do, there’s no going back. Their eyes fix on the parasite, locked there as though magnetized. The sight hits each poacher differently: a sharper quiver in the wrist, a deepened scowl, a retreating flinch, a slow nod. The man with the harpoon-blade steps toward me.
