#in which: jerry is sad tired and moping (his normal state) before going out to kill a dude

[greatshell-rider]

Lani was in the other room. The door swung shut by itself so she’d wedged a shoe between it and the frame to keep the door open. Yellow light from within the room, along with the sound of her interrogating a local—learning the language, dress, public’s knowledge of the broader universe, customs, politics, best place to get food—spilled into the apartment’s main room, washing over Jerry’s back as he sat hunched over in an old chair, staring at the object he held.

He turned it over in his hands.

“Ah, so it’s really—” Lani launched into a long string of alien garble, only a few of the sounds vaguely resembling noises that came naturally out of human throats.

Jerry tapped the object—a smooth metal sphere larger than a baseball—twice with his finger. It didn’t respond. His eyebrows scrunched and he traced a finger over the faint inscribed runes running around the ball’s circumference. It had worked before, hadn’t it? Almost as soon as they’d touched down on this ’scape, which was odd . . .

The rectangle of light flickered as Lani stood up to retrieve something from their packs, muttering under her breath as she rummaged through. The local shifted in their seat, the chair creaking at the motion.

Jerry straightened up, then slumped against the backrest of his chair, sliding his socked feet out on the cold tile of the floor to stretch out his legs. He laid the object on his chest, hugging it loosely, and stared moodily at it. In all the ’scapes . . . across all the galaxies . . . inside and out all the pocket dimensions and parallel universes . . . had he and Lani ever gotten a track this soon? He would’ve suspected it a trap, or an attempt to mislead them at the very least, had it not also been so irrefutable. The object bore the mark. It had to be him.

If he and his sister had learned anything in all of this time, it was how to identify their dad’s tracks.

And yet.

The quick back-and-forth of Lani and the local’s conversation started up again. The interrogation would continue long into the night, until either the local was exhausted or Lani was satisfied. And his sister was rarely contented so quickly.

Jerry sighed, long and slow, feeling his body deflate and droop deeper into the chair as his lungs emptied. He leaned his head forward, resting his forehead against the object. It was smooth and cold, like the tiled floor, only the lightest tickle on his skin hinting at the lettering etched into the metal.

“Why go quiet now, hmm?” he murmured to it, breath misting the surface. “We were so close. We are close. Can’t be far behind now . . .”

He felt . . . tired. He would have attributed it to Cindy leaving, but that had been what, three, four months ago? Surely he was . . . over it. By now? A handful of months was akin to an eternity after all . . . No, this was different. He was tired. They had been chasing him for so long. And after the disaster of the last ’scape . . .

The tag in his pants pocket twitched. He took it out and tapped it so bright red light flooded his face. He scanned the chart quickly and grunted, placing the object on the floor and slouching over to the window. He parted the blinds with two fingers, peering down twenty-six floors—or tubes, as they were called here—at the canal below. He grunted a second time.

“Lani,” he called in English, without turning his head, “informant’s arrived.”

The alien conversation fell silent. Lani asked, also in English, “The real one or the one sent to kill us?”

“Tag indicates the latter.”

“Eh. Take care of it, will you?”

Alien conversation resumed.

Jerry stared down at the gondola with its little cloak-wrapped person standing at its stern, longpole gripped in hand as they kept the boat from drifting away from the tenement’s entrance. Glaring neon pinks from the sign of the shop across the canal blasted the figure with light, yet Jerry couldn’t see their face.

A soft glow in the corner of his vision made him turn his head. The runes on the object were glowing a light blue, lighting the gray tiles below it in strange patterns of fuzzy shadow. Jerry snorted a quiet laugh. Typical,” he muttered, stepping away from the window and letting the blinds drop back to their normal placement. “Perfect timing as usual. That’s life!”

He went to the coatrack and took his sheathed sword off its peg. “Don’t go anywhere, yeah?” he mumbled as he put on his boots, too quiet for the object—had it been sentient—to hear, but directed at it anyway. “You know we’re close.”

They were close. They were so close. And then they could be finished. He could be . . . done, with it all. He just had to keep going. A little longer. A little harder. Just a few more ’scapes, a few more tracks, a few more—He looked down at his sword.

“A few more won’t hurt,” he whispered. What’s a paper cut to surgery?

He shook his head, dismissing the words. He was tired, yes, but what did it matter. He couldn’t quit now, could he, with the prize so close.

Could he?

Thoughts for a different time. Jerry tightened his grip on his sword and slipped out the apartment door, closing it softly behind him and striding down the floor’s corridor. There was a shortcut through the supply closet he was pretty sure. As he walked he took the tag out of his pocket again and tossed it ahead of him, stepping on and grinding it into pieces under his boot without slowing his pace. That would give the would-be assassin fair warning, at least. Fair-ish.

Back in the apartment room, unnoticed by anyone, the blue light of the marked object blinked once . . . twice . . . then bled into a vivid orange. It was a hue similar to that of a poisonous frog in some distant rainforest world, or that of a flame dancing on a candle’s wick. Beautiful, tantalizing, and dangerous. A warning of an objective doomed to fail. But who could resist the allure?