3: So This is Death

  Moby wasn’t behind their eyes anymore. They stared sightlessly at the ceiling, but it wasn’t them. It was just meat there on the table, stinking, shit-smeared meat, like so many of the guests Evit Jatus had seen taken out of the resort. None of them ever came back. Why should Moby? Jatus scribbled detailed notes for the report. She’d already spoken to Commander Colbs; now she only needed to document the mess.

  Doctor Jyso seemed to be taking it personally that Moby and Halex weren’t coming back. She sat on the floor in the corner, exhausted, with her head in her hands. Both bodies y on their beds with their uniforms torn open, marked by every machine and intervention the doctor had been able to think of using. They’d both gone stiff, then soft, then stiff again; now they were sck and still and had been for hours.

  Not even two cycles ago, Jatus been in Moby’s arms. They were what no one expected from a good Matil; the illicit tattoo of a Serpent of the goddess’s brood coiled at the small of their back never ceased to fascinate. Jatus had liked to kiss it after they’d both finished and they y together on the sofa rack.

  Now, the tattoo didn’t matter. Nothing mattered to Moby anymore, not even Jatus. She touched their swelling face. Their flesh squashed and tore under her fingers.

  She couldn’t remember anyone who’d simply ended this way—no one who mattered. Jatus turned aside and pulled a wipe from the toolbox between Halex on one side and Moby on the other to clean the rotten blood from her hands.

  On the other side of Moby, the girl y in the next bed. The Girl, Jatus had begun to think, but her name was Katherine MacGregor. She couldn’t be worth Moby, no matter how much magic she brought.

  “You’re being crazy, Evit. Nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens.”

  So much for that—but hadn’t the resort already been exploding with fractious guests for half a cycle by then? 252 of them had died, all told; that never happened either, so many at once. The upset had taken another cycle to quell.

  The Girl looked nothing like she’d pictured—close to Matil, with her eyes, nose, and mouth in almost the right pces on her little face. She had the right number of limbs; Jatus herself had a small tail, and she was the one with too many.

  The Girl had the right body-to-brain ratio to be entirely intelligent. What scared Jatus most: the hands, with their almond-shaped nails artificially polished a violent shade of blue. The cosmetics she’d applied clung to her face, a tiny smudge of sparkle; her chest rattled up and down on its own. Jatus knew she had come with clothes, a blue shirt the same color as her nails and a white leather jacket Jatus had looked on with envy. “They’re not the same, Evit,” Moby had said. “They don’t think like we do.”

  But what if they do? Jatus wondered. It was too awful to contempte, but she stepped to The Girl’s bedside.

  She had a name.

  It hadn’t been the first time Jatus wondered, but the evidence that any of the guests could navigate the Clutches of the Mother was slim at best. She picked up The Girl’s right hand.

  A line of calluses rose along the top of the palm, a swell at the bottom of each finger. The base of the thumb had toughened, as if she was used to holding something there, to working with it. Jatus’s stomach went tight; she dropped The Girl’s hand. It meant nothing.

  Doctor Jyso started to rock back and forth in small, jerky ticks, clutching her head. Jatus wanted to scream. If calluses and clothes and names meant nothing, why had Moby’s body rotted? The Matil must have underestimated their guests; there was no other answer, but Jatus didn’t want that to be true. It meant so many uncomfortable things, not least of all about her own ways of being.

  On the other side of the privacy wall, the sick bay doors slid open. A few moments ter, Captain Itef entered the area, his handsome face grim when his eyes fell on Jatus. He flicked his gaze away toward the doctor in the corner. Without preamble, he said, “I see you have not been able to revive Halex and Moby. Doctor, what is the status of the guest?”

  Jyso didn’t answer beyond a soft keening cry. She rocked, rocked, rocked.

  “Sir,” Jatus said, but stopped. She didn’t know what she was meant to say. Under Itef’s cold gre, she tried again. “Sir, the guest appears stable for the moment, but my ck of medical training…” She trailed off again, feeling as helpless as any one of them must have been feeling. Death had come for them like it came for every other creature.

  Itef made a concerned little noise. His nose almost, almost wrinkled, a sign of sure disgust. “Dismissed, Ensign. Bring your report to the conference room in an hour’s time.”

  “Yes, sir.” She saluted and barely kept from running away to the office. Controlled, she strode from the egg-shaped sick bay down white corridors, a touch of rich bck in the standard ovoid shape. Only an hour to prepare a report of this magnitude? He must be out of his mind, but he was the captain. He ruled the world ship; they all pyed his tune sooner or ter.

  An hour ter, Jatus stood on the bridge with a tablet containing her hastily typed reports. The business of the ship went on around her back with Commander Rhan in the captain’s chair, but she waited outside the conference room door. Her forked tongue flickered nervously out, a habit she hadn’t been able to break; she cmped it behind her teeth and gnced around her to see if anybody had noticed. She didn’t really know the bridge crew, but they knew who she was. Nobody was looking at her, but whispers about Moby had hissed around her from the office all the way here.

  Her tongue smashed against her teeth. Spine of the Mother! She almost wished Moby were here in her pce, but that was unkind at best.

  She waited five minutes more before the door swished open in front of her. Some of the highest officers on board were here, sitting around the wide white oval of the table, but she shouldn’t have expected any less.

  Commander Frixm, the Head of Resort Operations, stood behind the table giving a report of his own. Seemingly pointless graphs floated in midair, but what would she know? Fieldwork was more in her area than this.

  “Further,” he said as the door shushed behind Jatus, “the guest Commander Colbs acquired has proved an excellent source already. When she was loaded into the machine…” Reading from his clipboard, he rattled off a series of numbers, only a few of which Jatus understood. They’d gotten a lot from The Girl—that, she did grasp.

  The expanse of bck void sparkling with stars encircled Frixm’s pale head on every side. “In conclusion,” he said, after thirty solid seconds of what she knew wasn’t nonsense but sounded like gibberish, “even though we did not acquire High King Beriani Quintinar, this Princess Katherine MacGregor furnishes more power than we had hoped. I believe we may bel this project a qualified success, and I recommend we commence with the acquisition of Bearach Rev Liedan at once.”

  “Thank you, Commander.” The Captain’s smooth, cool voice filled her ears with rendered fat. Jatus had been staring at Frixm, brain clicking on in spite of her own best interests, while she waited for acknowledgement. Her tongue shed her teeth.

  “Indeed, Captain. If I may venture to say so, combined with Princess Katherine, having Bearach Rev Liedan as our guest will solve many of our problems.” Frixm cleared his throat, keyed off the blue-light graphs floating above the table, and sat fussily in his chair.

  Jatus gripped her tablet tight. She hoped her face didn’t show her reservations, her fear; Moby and Halex had died. Nobody did that. It just didn’t happen.

  “Very well.” Captain Itef drummed short nails on the tabletop. He seemed deep in thought, his almost-expressionless face creasing with concern as he turned to Jatus at st. “Ensign, your report, if you please.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jatus cleared her throat and stepped closer to the side of the oval, but she didn’t put her tablet on it; that would be unthinkably rude. The device felt heavy, freighted with too much meaning. As she flipped through the reports, her brain pinged a thousand pces at once, scattering like ball bearings on the details so she couldn’t decide what to say first.

  “Ensign Jatus.” That was Commander Colbs, sitting forward; she looked just the way Matil were meant to look, with her dark brown hair in a sleek knob at the base of her head. Her bck uniform was spotless. “Do me the courtesy of speaking in pin nguage. Can I expect my Marines to return to duty?”

  Jatus loosened her grasp on the tablet by an inch’s fraction. She raised her chin slightly. “No, ma’am.”

  A hush fell over the senior officers, almost like the quiet of the empty bodies, so still on their beds. Later, she thought, disconnected from herself like she floated above her body, I’ll probably cry. Now, though… her forked tongue flicked.

  Colbs pinched the bridge of her nose, the sudden movement startling Jatus badly. “I was afraid of that.”

  Steeling herself at st—the terrible truth had been spoken, and the bad had already happened—Jatus cleared her throat once more. “Neither Marine has revivified as expected. No efforts by Dr. Jyso were successful in inducing revivification. The Marines—the former Marines were both observed to be rotting.” She stopped, swallowing the sourness that touched the back of her throat.

  “Like animals,” Colbs said into the hush.

  “Yes, ma’am. They experienced the voiding evinced by the carcasses of the guests, as well as the stiffening and sckening of their muscuture. For all intents and purposes, they’ve died.” Every word seemed to weigh like the iron bracelet on The Girl’s wrist. “Permission to speak freely, sir.” Good Matil or not, if she said nothing now, she’d never be able to sleep again.

  Captain Itef frowned deeply, still seemingly lost in thought, but he shifted in his broad chair. Unlike all the rest, it had arms. “Highly irregur of you, Ensign. Nevertheless, what about this situation is not irregur? Permission granted.”

  “Forgive me, Captain, but the guests—” She gulped. Her tongue shed. “They appear intelligent.” Commander Frixm scoffed, but she forged on, tongue flickering out between her lips. “The Girl—Princesssssss—Katherine. She has callusssss—calluses that indicate she repeated the same motionsss thousands of timesss, but only on one hand.” The hissing was unbearable. She stopped to work the inside of her mouth, hoping control would come to her where it hadn’t before.

  “You are a fool, Ensign,” said Commander Frixm. How he had gotten his position with his pale hair, she didn’t understand. “If they are intelligent, the Matil are certainly several orders of magnitude above them.”

  Itef was as mild as he’d ever been, at least in public. “Perhaps to aly her concerns, Ensign Jatus would prefer a different assignment.”

  Panic jangled through her. I’m about to lose everything. She’d worked for this for hundreds of years, but she could say nothing, do nothing. The Captain’s word was w. Her tongue smmed painfully into clenched teeth.

  “Take her in hand and show her the workings of the resort personally,” Captain Itef said. His eyes on her were ft, emotionless, except for a tiny spark of pleasure at the very back. The space around her seemed huge, though it was absolutely normal in every respect. “Ensign, I’ll draw up the transfer myself.”

  “Yessssss—” Jatus groaned internally. In the resort, there would be no chance at all of advancement, and it was across the ship besides. She would know no one but Frixm. Her long slow career burned to ashes in a moment. “Captain.”

  “Dismissed.”

  She tore off a salute she didn’t really mean and marched to the doors of the conference room. As they flicked open to reveal the bridge, Captain Itef said, “You may wish to begin your packing.”

  She saluted again and tried not to make it look like she rushed out, but it probably did anyway. This day had been profoundly unexpected in all the worst ways.