I’d heard of people being too scared to make a sound before, but I’d never experienced it until that moment. As I stood there, watching his body twitch and swing at the end of his makeshift rope of bed linens, my mouth worked silently, trying to make some noise, any noise escape to bring help….but there was nothing, not so much as a squeak.
But I could move. There was a chair tipped onto its side beneath his feet that he’d obviously used to climb up and fix the rope to the ceiling. I righted it clumsily, climbing up onto the back and stretching as high as I could. It was no good; he was a good bit taller than me, and the spot where the sheets were wound around the light fixture was far out of reach. There was only one thing to do, and it only gave me one real shot: I jumped for the rope as hard as I could, managing to latch onto it desperately with one hand. Our combined weight brought the fixture crashing down on top of us as we fell to the floor.
I scrambled to my hands and knees, scurrying to shove both my hands between his throat and the loop of fabric constricted around it. I could feel my nails gouging into his flesh as I grabbed hold and pulled as hard as I could, but the knot slipped, letting loose its death grip on his neck. He might already be dead, the pessimist in me warned. His neck could be broken, hell, it could’ve broken in the fall. He could have been in his death throes already when I showed up, I’d read that people who hung themselves often twitched long after they were dead. His windpipe could have been crushed, or hell, I might just not have been fast enough, and he’d already gone too long without air—
A raspy, shuddering breath interrupted my train of thought, and I just stared at him in shock for a second that he was actually alive. I stretched the noose even wider, sliding it up and over his head. “Victor! Hey! Can you hear me? Open your eyes!” I was afraid to actually move him, but I patted his cheek lightly with my hand. It felt hot beneath my palm….hot and sweaty and kind of gross, actually, as awful as I know that sounds. I never was big on touching other people. But it was worth it, because his eyes blinked open, struggling to focus for a second or two before resting on me, obviously trying to process what had just happened.
Then his fist connected with my jaw, and my vision was taken over by a shower of stars as I flew back on my ass.
I’m sure it was a pretty awkward punch, him just having escaped death and woken back up to the land of the living and all, but it hurt. In fact, it had been years since I had been punched solid right in the face like that, and it hurt a lot more than I remembered.
“Fuck!” That’s what I was trying to say, anyway. It came out more of an incoherent, garbled screech. “What the fuck!” Articulate, I know, but it was t he best I could do while writhing on the floor in agony.
“You bitch! You fucking stupid bitch!” Victor’s screaming wasn’t much more coherent than mine; his voice was raspy and practically nonexistent, not that it stopped him. “Why the fuck did you do that? Why did you fuck it up?”
I was up on my knees by this time, my hand pressed over my nose and mouth because I really didn’t want to know just yet where the steady flow of blood was coming from. “You were dying!”
“You fucking idiot! You moron! You really don’t get it, do you? My sister is gone. She’s fucking dead! Without her, I’ve got nothing!”
I wondered dimly just what the hell t he walls of this building were insulated with, that no one had heard all the noise we were making. I also wondered just where my invisible protector was now. Maybe he just didn’t want Tengu to kill me, because Victor was coming at me again—at this point, I probably would have let him hang himself cheerfully, if only he’d asked—and I threw my hands up over my head to protect myself. Not the most brilliant evasive maneuver, sure, but it beat getting socked in the jaw again.
The blows never landed. When I finally lifted my head to see what had happened, he was pinned to the wall, stuck some three or four feet above the floor as if by invisible shackles.
I let my breath out in a long sigh of relief. About fucking time, I thought silently in the hopes whatever was looking out for me could read minds.
It must have been his loud demands that I put him down (like if I could’ve done that to him, I would have waited until after he punched me) that finally brought Biv to investigate. Frozen in the doorway, he just stared for a long moment before turning and fleeing down the hall. He returned a moment later with a very sleepy-eyed Puck, whose half awake commentary might have made me laugh; as it was, it just made me snort blood into the back of my throat and start coughing.
“Well, what the hell. Can’t take my eyes off you people for a second, can I?”
Biv was the one who finally helped me to my feet, since he wasn’t absorbed in dreaming up witty observations. “Oh, Holly!” His eyes got even wider, if that was possible, when he got a good look at my face and all the blood dribbling out from under my fingers. “Your face…!”
That did make me laugh, and I instantly regretted it. My cheek and lips felt like they’d been inflated with a tire pump. I could only imagine what I looked like. By that time, Tallana and
“You okay, princess?” Puck leaned over to try and peel my hand away from my mouth, and I considered seriously jabbing him in the eye. “Come on.” Sliding an arm around my waist, he gently tried to pry me away from Biv. “It’s alright, Bivvy. I’ll go get her taken care of. You’ve already got one patient, and she’s hard enough to handle, right?”
Biv glanced involuntarily towards his room. It was pretty clear he didn’t like leaving Kiasis alone, but he seemed hesitant to leave me, either.
“It’s okay.” I started to smile, and then remembered that that would probably not only hurt, it’d probably be pretty damn ghastly as well, what with all the blood in my mouth. “It’s just a bump.” A bump that left me talking like I had a whole bag of marshmallows in my mouth. Marshmallows with razorblades inside. But I supposed I’d live.
He still hesitated, but in the end he squeezed my arm, flashed me a sympathetic look, and headed back to his own room—with barely a glance at Victor as he p assed him by, I noticed with a certain amount of vicious smugness.
Myself, I wanted to walk over there and kick him where he lay, but Puck insisted on herding me gently out into the hall and towards his room instead. He’d left the door open in his rush to come to my aid, and I stopped walking for a second when I got my first good look at the room’s interior. If I’d ever pictured what Puck’s room would look like on the inside, it wouldn’t have been this. It looked like a computer and a library had had some kind of obscene orgy, and left the space littered with forgotten children. Books and papers and mechanical parts threatened to tumble down on my head as he guided me to the bed, the one clear space in the room, and sat me down on the mattress’s edge. On the far side of the room, a computer terminal whined and clicked for its master’s attention, but Puck was too busy rummaging through a half-open drawer to pay it any mind.
“I know I’ve got one here somewh—ha!” He finally surfaced with an instant cold pack in his hand, bending it sharply to activate it. “Here, put this on your cheek.” A moment later, he had a damp cloth in his hand as well, and was using it to gingerly wipe the rapidly crusting blood away from my face. “Y’know, if this is what happens when I tell you to go clean up, by all means, next time feel free to stay dirty…!”
His teasing didn’t even make my lips twitch. “He tried to hang himself!” I blurted out from behind the cold pack (which felt like heaven, by the way). “Then, when I got him down, he punched me!”
“Well, thanks for sharing that,” He replied absently as he finished mopping the blood off my chin. “Since I’m betting all Milo and Tallana are going to get out of him any time soon are a variety of different ways to say ‘Oh, poor me, I’m all alone in the world.’”
I frowned a little bit. Sure, I didn’t like the guy too much right now, but that seemed just a little harsh. “Well…..I guess he kind of is.”
“And what were you, before we met? What was I, for that matter, when I came here? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never tried to play cat’s cradle in the rafters because of it. Everybody finds themselves alone, one time or another. Call me a crazy pacifist, but I don’t think that gives them the right to go around smashing the noses of people half their size, especially when they’re just trying to help. And as soon as he’s out of the fetal position, I intend to go explain that to him. Now…let’s find you a new shirt.” He pushed himself away from the bed and crossed the room to his closet. “I think that one’s seen better days, and I don’t see me making it out of here to go shopping for you any time soon.”
I didn’t answer, but I looked down at myself, and I had to agree. I was lucky that particular shirt hadn’t just fallen off me in shreds by now. I felt a little guilty, because it wasn't even mine, it was Biv's, but there wasn't much I could do about it now. Waiting patiently for him to find something suitable, my eyes fell to a stack of books at my feet, and I reached down to take a quick look at their titles. The first was in Spanish. The second one was in a different language; I thought it was German, but I couldn’t be sure. The next had a title made out in symbols that my eyes didn’t even immediately register as letters; Japanese, maybe? Finally, my eyes lit on an English title--Expansion of Moments for Solving Time Dependent Neutron Transport in Semi-Infinite Medium.
…………
…..What? I’d read the title and still didn’t know what it was about. “You read all this stuff?”
“Oh, sure!” Grinning, Puck tossed a clean shirt across my knees. “I’ve been stuck here a long time, you know. It’s only natural I puck up a language or ten along the way, and I knew a few of them before I came. Besides, it was the best way to get all the information I needed. A lot of the best schools don’t teach in English, and I don’t care what anybody says, there’s always something lost in translation.”
I turned the book over, repeating aloud the one phrase I nearly understood. “Theoretical physics…?”
“Well, that’s what I started out to learn, anyway. I ended up dabbling in a lot of other stuff along the way, though. It seemed like every world that I came to when I was searching for you, they had different ideas, different theories that I wanted to see if I could incorporate into my own work, and it was just so different learning it hands-on than it was reading about it….then I started getting asked to lecture, and they started giving me grants….can you imagine, getting free money just to learn things and prove you’re right about them? For about the first ten years, I was in heaven, let me tell you!” He seemed to be on a bit of a roll, but he sobered suddenly, his hands dropping to his sides. “But I’m afraid it might have slowed me down in my search for you. I’m sorry for that, I really am. Kiasis kept telling me not to get sucked into it. But!” He brightened again like somebody had turned on a light bulb behind his eyes. “It was for the best, in the long run…!”
Apparently, I was supposed to get the point of that statement. I didn’t, and I’m sure my blank stare told him as much.
“Well, we’ve got to get home somehow, don’t we? Here, look!” Dropping down to his knees, he reached beneath the bed and pulled out a long metal case, flipping the lid open proudly.
I’d never seen him look so excited and animated about anything, at least not since finding me. It almost made me feel bad that the only way I could describe his proud creation was an unidentifiable jumble of computer chips, wires and metal.
“It looks like a jumble of computer chips, wires and metal.”
He looked at me like I’d just insulted his firstborn child. “This is not a jumble of anything….! This drive would revolutionize the way our ships travel through space. It’ll completely rework the rate at which fuel is consumed, and the speed at which ships can move. It could send our military exploration teams in search of new universes to explore, instead of just planets!” Sighing, he let the lid drop and pushed the case back beneath the bed again. “That is, if they ever saw it.”
“Why wouldn’t they?” I took the cold pack away from my face and lifted the t-shirt to examine it. Besides looking like it was barely my size, let alone Puck’s, it was pale pink, and there were a pair of long-tailed songbirds on the front. Beneath the birds, in flowing script, was the word “Swallows.” Nice. “Why would you even make the thing, if you weren’t ever going to let anybody see it…?” I took another look at the shirt…maybe I could turn it inside out. “Um…are you sure this is yours…?”
Puck turned, eyes grazing over the front of the shirt before I found it snatched out of my hands. “Don’t know where that one came from.” He returned to the closet, pulling out a box labeled “Lost and Found” in hastily scrawled black ink. It was spilling over with a variety of items, many of them pastel and lacy.
I arched an eyebrow. “You have a lost and found in your closet….?”
He at least had the decency to seem a little uncomfortable. “Hey, all work and no play, right? Anyway,” He finally tugged another shirt out of the tangle of fabrics and tossed it to me, this one pale blue and blissfully plain. “You remember how I mentioned that I was a sprite? Sprites are just not like the other races on Faerie.” He tossed me the shirt, raising a fingertip to tap his temple. “There’s a lot going on up here, but magic just isn’t on the list. Oberon’s magic got me here, just like it did Titania, but if I want to get home, until someone runs communication lines all the way to Faerie, I’ve got to make my own ticket.”
“So….he just….stranded you here….?” I looked at him skeptically. “Some great friend.”
“That friend is your family, remember; be nice. And he wasn’t thinking straight. What’s a decade or two between friends, anyway, at least when you live to be our age? Anyway, I’ve already used it on short test runs. It’ll take all of about six hours for me to plug it into the engine of my ship, and we’ll make it home in less than a month.”
My eyes bulged a bit. “A month?”
“Hey, compared to the century the trip would take without it, we’re getting an express ticket, okay? The trick is, getting back to my ship and getting the thing in without your fan club coming along to snatch you and the drive right up.”
“Why would they want to steal the drive?” That didn’t make any sense to me. “They got here by magic, didn’t they? Why would Tengu and Karu need it…?”
“They don’t need it to get home. But Titania does. The terms of the spell Oberon used to exile her state that she ‘may not return home by means of her own magicks, nor by any others’.’ So Tengu can’t ferry her back home the same way he will his brother…”
“….but they could use that thing,” I pointed under the bed, where the drive lay out of sight. “And take her home again?”
“And leave you and me stranded or dead in the process, yeah. So until I figure out how to do it safely, it stays right here with me and you. Now, I’m going to go see if your boxing partner is still planning on dangling himself from the lighting fixtures anytime soon if left to his own devices. You go ahead and change shirts, and just open the door up when you’re done, okay?” He hovered by the doorway until he saw me nod, then he pulled the door shut behind him.
It was less than a couple of minutes before there was a knock at the door again. Impatient, I thought as I went to answer it, but it wasn’t Puck. It was Biv.
“I brought you a glass of water,” he said quietly. “Your face looks…..better.”
“I haven’t had the guts to look at it yet.” I smiled a little. “I bet I look like I got caught on the wrong side of a six-car pile up, huh?”
That made Biv smile a little, at least. “It’s not that bad….”
“Riiiight.” I wasn’t all that worried about it, to be honest. I doubted it was anything that was going to leave a scar, and it wasn’t like I really planned on winning any beauty contests soon. I took the glass of water, taking a small drink, and a sudden, persistent chiming noise drew my attention. “What’s that…?” It was annoying, whatever it was.
“Oh,” Biv just shrugged. “It’s the message alert on Puck’s computer. It’ll keep making that sound until he clicks on the message.”
“Oh. One of those. I hate those things.” Frowning at the source of the irritating racket, I walked over to click on the screen’s message box. The message would pop up, unless it was radically different from every other mail system in creation, I could tell Puck about it when he came back, and my ears wouldn’t be assaulted by the horrid sound until then.
When the box popped up, I really didn’t intend to read it, but it was so short I couldn’t really help but see the single line of text:
Must move our meeting to later.
I stared at it, blinking, before I turned away. There had to be a million people on Acomia alone who could sign a note with the initial K. Surely Puck was meeting one of them, and not the K. who sprang into my overworked mind.
Of course. I was exhausted, and being overly paranoid and suspicious, I told myself. Daring rescue attempts and near-broken jaws and the like aside, things were just going too well for me. Maybe I was looking for something wrong, something that could mess things up, and seeing things that weren't really there...?
That had to be it, of course. There was no way Puck was sneaking around, having private meetings with someone who seemed pretty devoted to helping his brother murder me.
....Right....?
