Steam Ch. 03

"Brazen of you, considering all the fresh hamburger I just made," Nash said. Sweat poured over his face. Red coronae had formed at the edges of his eyes. He was over exerting himself.

"I don't fear you, boy," she said. The woman undid her top and let it fall away, revealing a bra and a fully tattooed torso. She was the mark, then. "I walk in shadow."

"So you do," Nash said, wiping his brow. "What's your name, woman? I'd like to forget it when I've finished with you."

"Cheryl, of Dane," she said with a mocking curtsy. "A simple name, but you'll speak it before the dead gods at this night's end, boy." He smiled. "And how am I to call you, that I may forget in time?"

Nash laughed and unbuttoned his own shirt, showing her the tattoo on his own chest, his arms out to his sides. Her eyes narrowed and she fell to her knees, chanting.

Nash rushed her, putting everything he had into getting to her as the circles across the ground began rippling with red light. He was only a meter away from her, the hot blade a finger's-length away from her neck when the beast erupted from the ground and sent him flying back. The music hit a fever pitch, the reedy horn squalling in his ears.

He put a finger to his nose and blew a wad of blood onto the ground. The pit beast rose from the nether before him. Cheryl had torn a hole in the world and drawn out a creature from beyond the veil of reality. It wavered between them, half-immaterial from the partial summoning. Its tendrils waved in the air. A single golden eye fixed on Nash. It charged.

The speed sigils on his legs smoked from the effort of the dodge. The thing was incredibly fast. Even only half-real, its tentacles managed to cleave a large chunk out of the wall. If he could just manage to kill the woman, its ties to the physical world would be severed. An invisible tentacle shot out of the floor and slapped him against the ceiling. He only barely managed to get his shield up in time to block a second strike that sent him flying into the far wall.

The world began going sideways. His vision was steadily growing red from overexertion. Any more combat would be seriously detrimental to every party involved. The creature shrieked and raised whatever counted as its front end, revealing a clattering bird's beak. Nash leaned back as it started to charge and fell through the broken wall behind him. The music was unbearably loud in there.

He looked around and saw four skeletons, decades old at least, crumbled atop rusted chairs. Heavily aged instruments lay atop them or at their sides. A single drumhead sat in front of one, desiccated and split evenly down the middle. As soon as he looked at them, the music stopped. The creature and Cheryl screamed in unison.

Nash stepped out of the hole in the wall. The creature was curled up on itself, shaking violently. Cheryl stumbled around aimlessly, clutching her head. Nash found himself breathing easier without the music playing. The creature noticed him again and began making its slow way toward him. Then something blew a hole through the ceiling and obliterated the thing wholesale. Semi-visible pieces of it splattered against the walls and began instantly evaporating.

"Wow," Nash said, shrugging. "Providence smiles I suppose." He shook his head and picked a handgun off one of the corpses. He strolled over to Cheryl, who was having a hard time trying to escape toward the door. Blood from her nose and ears had begun clotting on her chest and shoulders.

"What's your name again?" He asked. She stopped and tried to fix a crooked eye on him.

"Ch—"

"Nope," he interrupted, firing a round into her head. She fell to the floor and he emptied the last few rounds into her for good measure, then tossed away the gun. Nash went to leave. The bit of ceiling in front of the door exploded in front of him. He waved a flurry of plaster dust away from his face, looked up at the hole and raised his palms, shaking his head. "Seriously, this place."

Gunfire got louder as he climbed the stairs toward the exit. Methodical, delocalized pops from throughout the building. Probably an execution of some sorts. Really none of his business. Honestly, Nash felt rather tuckered out and involving himself in any way seemed too much of a chore at the moment. He sniffed the air. Somebody had started a fire in the building.

A silver-haired girl, completely naked save a collar, nearly fell against him as he entered the hallway. She mouthed some plea for help as he sidestepped her and the gaping bullet hole in her chest. No time for dead women, he thought to himself, catching sight of somebody familiar in the hall ahead. Nash recognized him and smiled. The little snake.

"Out of the way!" Screamed a woman from behind him. Nash turned and saw two women, a southerner and a dashing bit of Christmas cake, sprinting toward him. He stepped aside and bowed graciously as they passed, causing the redhead to give him a curious look. He winked in return.

They barreled past his quarry, nearly knocking the slithery little eel on his backside. Nash let him stand and escape the building before following.

The snake wormed his way through Coalton and Nash followed by rooftop. Outside of the brothel, it was much easier to breath. Despite his exhaustion, casual use of magic was no longer a major issue, and the coronas had thankfully faded. The cold wind felt amazing on his face between each jump, and he was having eel for dinner. Despite the setbacks, some nights were just made better than others were.

Nash didn't have to follow his quarry strictly, he knew where the man was going. He even had a suspicion as to where, exactly, the man was headed at this very moment. There would be more questions raised than answered if he was right, but the lead was promising and that was what really mattered.

Soon they were at the hotel, the hotel Compton E&L had rented for its employees staying over in Coalton before their long trip west. Nash perched on a roof across the street, counted the windows and smiled when he saw he had predicted accurately. The faint hint of a hobo's flame bobbing around in the dark. He leapt soundlessly across the void, landed on the porch and let himself inside the room.

"Hello there," he said, a shadow against the light from the city. The interloper stopped and held up the flame, casting eerie light on both their faces.

"Who's that?" Asked the eel, the little snake. The man's face softened when he saw Nash's borrowed face. "Oh, Perry, is that you?"

"Yes," Nash said. He moved closer.

"How'd you get in here?" He asked. Nash pointed to the patio door. "Oh, uh, I guess she's waiting for you then?"

"No," Nash said. "Not tonight. She doesn't know where I am."

"Then why are you here?"

"You've been giving her bad dreams, haven't you, little snake?" Nash asked. He moved closer.

"What? Yes, but..." The eel began to understand. His eyes went wide. "Oh... god, Fries' place... who are you."

"You know," Nash said, removing the pendant from around his neck. The mask slid from his face like water.

He tried to scream, but he couldn't make a sound.

Pram bent down to scratch away the tickling sensation on her ankle. The shadow of the Bella floated over her long rectangles as it pulled off station to idle on the rail spur. She could still feel the gravegrass from the dream rubbing against her leg. The stuff only grew in the southeast, on the borders of the Verdant Waste. It tended to leave a rash. She scratched harder.

The drive hadn't exhausted her to the extent she thought it would. The sleep state she experienced in the drive chamber wasn't real sleep, but more of a meditative state. Not being in good health and mentally fit could cause a burnout, or worse, a fading. No more magic, or being completely obliterated from the mortal plane.

Pram had seen another student lose himself during a practice drive session. The engine ran and charged successfully until the end of the session without any indication something was wrong. When the instructor opened the chamber, the boy was just gone. Nothing but a bit of dust and the ozone stink of magic. Pram rubbed the space between her watch and her wrist.

She walked the length of the platform and stepped onto a rubber walkway belt running into the heart of the station. The Bella was the last train in for the next few hours, and the platform was mostly empty.

Coalton's mother engine rumbled away beneath her. The entire city ran on a combination of clockwork, magic and electricity, like most of the "new cities" in the Imperium. New city was a political term for building a much better city atop whatever had passed for a city before that. Pram didn't care for the politics, but the eternally running clockwork in the city's underground felt like a lullaby as she walked.

"Hey," said Kit, running along the belt to catch up with her. Pram sighed to herself, she didn't have the energy to talk with people now. "Hey, wait up."

"The belt moves on its own Kit," she replied. "How am I going to wait for you on a moving belt?"

"Fair," he said, now caught up. "Do you have a minute?"

"I have until the end of this belt," she replied. "Then I'm going up to my hotel room and going to bed forever. This day has been long and weird and it needs to end."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," she said, thumbing the thick packet of money in her pocket. She met with Cartwright before doing her nightly maintenance on the Bella to accept the longer contract. "We're running out of beltway Kit"

"Oh, uh, yeah," he said. "So you've been seeing that maintenance guy, Bennett, right?"

She turned her eyes up to Kit, but didn't respond. She thought of Bennett, ducking out of sight just before she entered Cartwright's office. Apparently, this long, terrible day was now going to involve a long, terrible conversation. Kit wetted his lips, looked around.

"I... uh..." He ran his fingers over his head. "I don't want to barge in on your personal business, but... have you noticed that he's been... odd lately?"

Pram stared at him and he continued. She knew where this was going.

"Well, um, I guess I have and I think maybe you might consider slowing it down with that guy?" She sighed. "Look, I don't want to be the guy to do this, but seriously, I've got a bad feeling—"

Pram held her hands up in front of her.

"Looks like we're out of belt Kit," she said, turning away from him and stepping off toward the doors to the hotel.

"Just think about it, ok?" He yelled after her. She ignored him and kept walking.

He was right, though. Bennett was being weird. Guys were always weird after waking up next to a girl for too many nights in a row. She was probably being weird. This day sucked. Pram mussed up the hair on the sides of her head in frustration and groaned.

The lobby of the hotel, which Pram thought might be called the Grand Lynx or something, but she had forgot, was beautiful. Black spotted marble floors and anodized brass fixtures. Black wood lobby furniture with plush red and blue upholstery. Everything in Coalton was either decadent or decayed, and this building was the former and in spades.

Sound buffers built in to the base of the building reduced the vibration of the mother engine to a whisper. To Pram, it felt like someone with slender fingers massaging her scalp. She made her way past a curtsying concierge and into the elevator. She pushed the lever to twenty and the platform rose beneath her.

The bit of clockwork powering the car up the shaft was visible behind thick glass at the rear of the car. She pressed her hand against it and felt the burnished cogs whirring away beneath her hand. Pram closed her eyes and counted. The mechanical action in the device repeated itself every five seconds at the current rate of ascension, which meant the mechanism had a work efficiency of—

The doors behind her slid open. She could smell wet earth, grass, something wasn't right. She turned and saw the elevator had opened onto a dark forest path. Gravegrass waved from the spaces between the roots and the fat toadstools lining the way ahead. She looked back and saw the clockwork window had been replaced by a mossy stone wall. Things moved in the leaves overhead.

No option but forward, she thought, trying to shake away the dream and failing. It was too realistic. Her boots sank in the mud, pulling at her feet. The smells and sounds became overpowering. Something shook the bushes a little ways away. She froze in place instinctually. A low, throaty purr.

Something like a snake curled through the brush to her right. She ran. It followed, screaming.

Pram sprinted through the forest, not knowing what path led where, moving only on fear and instinct. It was gaining ground behind her, crashing through the trees and squealing. She cut a hard right turn, grabbing a handful of vines to maintain momentum. It brushed the back of her neck. She fell, landing hard on the plush red carpet of the hotel hallway.

She turned and her hands went up defensively, blocking out the modest light from the overhead fixture.

"What?" She asked nobody. The hall was empty and clean. The only plant she could see was a potted fichus by a table in the center of the hallway. Her body shook from adrenaline. "I'm going nuts. What the fuck. I'm actually a crazy person."

Her mad sprint had left her out of breath and only a few doors down from her room. She closed the distance in a haze.

Her hand stung when she went to turn the doorknob. She pulled it back and saw the skin on her palm had been abraded enough to bleed a bit. Scraped raw by the rough bark of the vine she had grabbed. She looked down the length of the hall. Nothing but flat corners where the hall turned toward the elevator. She sighed and walked into her room, glad for the day to end.

Corsivo's neck hissed as the man in her room finished cutting through it with a magic sword. Pram froze halfway into the room. The stranger met her eyes and dropped the body. He looked down at the severed head in his hand and then back to her. He shrugged and smiled.

"Don't suppose we can talk this out?" He asked.

End of Chapter 3

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