Page 51 of Odder Still
where yours and mine interact.
When you continue for home,
will you even look back?
THE TRUTH COMES TOGETHER, piece by piece: Malloch’s twisted smile, their determination to peg the murder on Tavish and me, the upper-city gleam to Lilias’s weapon stockpile. The red smear of paint on their boot in the pool room and the way they flinched when I grabbed their pistol in the library, as though that wrist had been hit recently. It was never Lilias under the assassin’s cloak. It was Lilias’s partner. It was Malloch.
They train their pistol toward us.
The parasite jolts me with warmth, urging me to act, to fight, to run. Malloch shot the guards, not us. They still want us alive, then. I hope.
The guard’s cart stands a few strides to our right, its absent door gaps inviting. I grab Tavish and pull him toward it. Shots follow us, but they scatter somewhere over our shoulders. We slide into the cart. A pipe of ignation flows through its console. The keyhole is empty.
“You can’t run from this,” Malloch calls, polished tone reaching a melody. “Felons won’t go free in this city for much longer.”
Tavish latches to my arm. “Can you make it go?”
“I’m trying.” In the split second it takes me to wonder how we’ll start the cart, the parasite flares. It slams my palm against the keyhole, moving me through its black gashes. As it does, other tendrils of it dig deeper into me as well. I jerk, hissing through my teeth.
“We were going to let you live, Tavish.” Malloch’s dark silhouette appears in the cart’s vapor-blurred side mirror. “If you come out now and bring our aurora back to us, we might offer you something better. You wanted to help the lower city? Why don’t you finally do it? We could use a mind and voice like yours.”
Tavish goes taut. His unfocused eyes look even more distant than usual, as though he sees into the future, calculating each possible choice and running it to its end. The contemplation in the look spears a little more panic into me than I’d like, but he only whispers, “Whatever you’re doing, hurry.”
His worry fuels my resolve to leave, and the parasite slips beneath the emotion, taking advantage of it to dive into the keyhole. The ignation engine whirs to life with an electric hum, blackened rainbows pulsing and shining off the silver in its console. The parasite’s pressure weighs on me, the empty exhaustion left behind in my chest so overwhelming that all I feel is it and the creature and our mixed fear.
Once we’re safe—once we’re safe, I’ll stop relying on the parasite. What good is it to die now, after I’ve already given it so much, if one more inch can save us? I’m still me. We’re still—I’m still—still me.
I slam down one of the pedals. Nothing. I push the other instead. The cart blasts forward at nearly twice the speed of a sprinting human. Tavish’s hand finds my thigh, and I swear he grows claws.
Malloch curses. A spattering of bullets follows us down the street.
“You do know how to drive this, right?” Tavish shouts.
“How different can it be from a boat?” I tuck the knife into my belt and yank on the wheel, finally spinning it when nothing else will make it move. We turn with a screech, clattering down an alleyway. Three pedestrians plaster themselves to the wall as we roll by. I cackle, the laugh something between cynicism and insanity. “All I need now is a stiff drink!”
As we launch from the tunnel, the ruthless purr of Malloch’s motorcycle follows us. We turn into the street, narrowly missing the chugging trolley. A billow of vapor slides around us. As it clears, a third body appears in the cart, hovering at Tavish’s far side, black clad and snarling. I nearly swerve into the closest building to knock them off before I recognize the intruder.
Somehow Tavish knows who she is just by the way she plunks into the seat next to him, still half hanging out of the cart. “Sheona!”
“Told you she’d find us,” I grumble, but my heart lifts all the same. A group of shoppers cusses us out because I refuse to slow for them. They dodge at the last moment.
Sheona scowls. “Seemed a bad sign when Malloch arrived at the gate and immediately took off into the lower city. Tracked them here, the bastard.”
“They’re the assassin,” I explain, “working with a rather shifty rebel group.”
Sheona hisses through her teeth. “Fucking—turn left here.”
I swing the wheel, and we launch into a descending tunnel. The cart rattles over every step, jolting my teeth against each other. Tavish holds tight to me. I grip the wheel for both our lives, hoping with each step that our back end won’t rise to flip us. Sheona rides the plunge as if she’s done it a thousand times, screeching at the pedestrians to get out of our way.
As we peel off the final step, I glance in our mirrors. The lights of Malloch’s motorcycle cascade along the tunnel wall.
“Go right,” Sheona shouts. “Then left again down the next set.”
I spin the wheel, turning us in an arc around a cluster of startled schoolchildren in shabby, brown uniforms, and dive our cart into another descent. “Where are we going?” My speech rattles with every bounce.
“To the dredges?” Tavish asks.
Sheona nods, or maybe her chin just dips from the jolting. “Aye.”
