The fug is a terrible place for anyone accustomed to the surface. It is dim on the brightest days and pitch-black on most others. Without a mask, the air is lethal to surface folk. Much of it is empty, and what isn’t has been either converted into a fug city or reclaimed by what the fug had made of the local flora and fauna. The cities were livable, though rare was the city that actually tolerated surface folk. But as much as the fug folk had made themselves enemies of the surface, they had nothing on the wildlife. Thus, while the fug was wretched, The Thicket was infinitely worse.
Between the fug itself and the jagged branches overhead, Nita couldn’t see much more than a few paces ahead. Dr. Prist, more at home in the fug than she, could see a bit better, but not sufficiently to make navigation more than guesswork. The handheld phlo-light Nita kept in her tool sash had long ago run dry, so this was as good as things would get until they found help.
“How is the arm?” Nita asked, helping Prist over a fallen tree that had more thorns than bark.
“I think my body has reached the limit of how much pain it can communicate. It’s all fallen away to a general ache. I’d be fascinated if I weren’t the one experiencing it.”
“That is a small mercy, at least.”
Between Nita’s handiness and Prist’s greater-than-average knowledge of medical care, they’d been able to splint the chemist’s injured arm and patch up the worst of the gashes they’d endured during their landing. There simply wasn’t enough intact machinery in the ruined station to make a vehicle of any sort, but they were able to scavenge some food and water. Walking through the thorny thicket had steadily replaced the patched-up cuts and scrapes and burned through many of their supplies with no end in sight.
“It has been ages. Are you certain you know where you are going?” Prist asked, eyeing the darkness around them with distrust.
“I am not even certain there is a precise destination. We’ve only ever done business with these people a few times, and they’ve been in a different place each time.”
“Then why did we come this way?”
“Because it will take us a week to get somewhere friendly on foot. Our best chance is getting to Ichor Well, and that means going through The Thicket anyway. If luck is with us, we’ll find help and shave a few days off that.”
“Nita, I think it is fair to say that present evidence suggests luck is most certainly not with us.” She stumbled. “If I’d known I would be hiking, I would have chosen different shoes…”
“You don’t think we’re lucky? We each fell out of the sky and survived. And we’ve been hiking through The Thicket and haven’t had to fend off anything nightmarish. That’s better luck than I’d expected.”
“Mmm… I suppose luck is relative. We are marginally closer to the best case than the worst.” Prist glanced into the darkness. “I wish the phlo-light had lasted a bit longer. I hate not knowing what the darkness holds.”
“It would only draw attention to us.” Nita paused. “And I’m not sure I want to know what the darkness holds.”
Prist shut her eyes. “A bit of ignorance would be nice, right now. I’m haunted by the images in my biology books. What sort of fug beasts have you seen?”
“Aye-ayes, squarrels, fughounds, and one or two shadowy things in cages. Now and then while I was helping to set up Ichor Well, I saw eyeshine that I had to look up to spot. I’m hoping they were squarrels in trees.”
“There are mice. Smaller than you’d think. You wouldn’t have seen them, they stay out of the light and never leave the fug. You should feel fortunate you haven’t encountered any of the lizards. They are mostly to the south. Drier climates.” She shuddered. “Some of them have wings. And the bears. I’ve only seen the bones, but—”
“Dr. Prist, what were you just saying about ignorance?”
“Right, right. I apologize. I lecture when I’m nervous.” She trudged a few more steps. “I wonder what… I should keep quiet.”
“What were you going to say?”
“I don’t think it will be conducive to a placid mindset.”
“Nothing is conducive to a placid mindset right now. What were you going to say?”
“I was wondering what Dr. Wash is doing with Lil right now.”
Nita squeezed her fist tight, her leather glove creaking at the pressure. “He is taking very good care of her.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because he doesn’t know that we’re dead. And if he doesn’t know that we’re dead, he has to assume we’re alive. And if he has to assume we’re alive, he’s has to assume we’re coming for him. Either he’s hoping to use her as a hostage to keep us at bay, or he’s hoping that by sparing her life, he’ll earn our mercy. I am absolutely certain that he’s got her safe and sound.”
“And what about after she loses her memory? What about after she isn’t Lil anymore?”
“She is Lil. She will always be Lil.”
They trudged farther. Nita looked at Prist. She looked to be considering something very carefully.
“If you’re worried something you’re going to say is going to come across the wrong way, speak. Right now we’ve just got each other. No sense one of us pussyfooting around the other.”
“Every minute that passes, Lil is more thoroughly a fug person. The more thorough, the more complete the transition, the more dangerous the treatment will be. Even if it works precisely as I predict it to, it will be a match for the danger of the initial change from surface folk to fug folk. While she is mostly human, it should have little risk at all and happen quite quickly. If this takes even a few days longer, it could easily turn her survival to a flip of a coin. Much longer than that and she would have little hope of survival.”
“How will we know the risk?”
“We won’t. This is unprecedented. Uncharted territory. I could easily spend the rest of my career carefully studying the effects of this substance without having a solid answer to that question. And there is the matter of the memories. I don’t even know enough to hazard a guess, what will—”
“I don’t care about the memories,” Nita said. “If she loses what memories we had, we’ll make new ones. We have more of our life together ahead of us than behind. I just want her safe, and I just want her back.”
“It is an easy thing to say, but when she looks at you and doesn’t know you…”
“We do what we can. What happens happens. One way or another, we’re getting Lil back.”
The pair continued, leaden silence hanging over them for a few minutes. The thorny trees gradually became sparser. Not so sparse that they had left The Thicket. Indeed, by now they were likely entering the depths of the rugged place. This was either a rare clearing or simply a place where the smaller trees had been choked out by the larger ones. Still, the change gave each of the women pause.
“I don’t like this,” Nita said. “Something about it seems… wrong.”
“I agree. This place seems perfectly suited for—”
“A trap?”
“Precisely.”
Nita crouched and felt around the ground. Dr. Prist did the same.
“Here,” Dr. Prist said, after a bit of search. “Come look. And stay to my left.”
The free-wrench approached. Sure enough, Prist had found a stout bit of simple rope. It had been laid out along the ground and led to a tree, where it continued upward.
“It’s a net trap. I can just see where the leaves have been spread over it.”
“It’s an enormous trap,” Prist said.
“Big enough to haul up one of those things from your biology books?” Nita said.
“Some of them. I suppose we’d best take this route around the outside. I’ll lead the way.”
Dr. Prist crept forward. Nita considered the trap a bit longer.
“Wait,” she said. “I think we can use this.”
She looked around until she found a sizable piece of half-rotten log. She heaved it onto the netting. Somewhere, a thread snapped. A weight came plunging down from above, dragging behind it a rope, which, through a sequence of pulleys, drew the net up and away. Most importantly, whatever mechanism was hidden in the trees above produced an ear-piercing siren-wail. Dr. Prist and Nita covered their ears as the sound grew to a climax, then gradually died away.
“What was that?” Dr. Prist said.
“Hopefully it was an alarm to let the trappers know they’ve caught something. If nothing else, this gives us a good reason to stop for a rest.”
“I shan’t argue with that.”
Nita helped her to sit, then flopped down beside her.
“Is there any food or water left?” Dr. Prist asked.
The engineer rattled the canteen they’d taken from the station. “All out. Oh! But I do have this.” She unfastened one of the larger pouches and revealed a small tin. Inside, wrapped in waxed paper, were two macaroons. “Wink has grown quite fond of them,” she said. “You should see the look he gives me when he comes tapping and I don’t have any for him.”
“Wink… what’s become of him, I wonder?” Dr. Prist said. “It’s odd how such a disagreeable creature can come to be so beloved a part of the crew.”
“That’s the nature of a crew. At least, the sort of crew the Wind Breaker has… or even the steamworks back home. When the work is hard, when it’s dangerous, you have kinship, whatever your differences. You know that you’re in it together. When the worst happens, you know that any one of the crew could be the one to save your life. And you could find yourself having to save the life of any one of them. It’s a special sort of family.”
Prist slowly shook her head. “And to think, I was pleased to have had such a sheltered life. But if it cost me that sort of kinship, perhaps all of this madness is worth it.”
She held the macaroon for a moment, then handed it back. “Save it for Wink. I would hate to be the one responsible for getting on his bad side.”
#
Forty-five minutes had passed since Nita had triggered the trap. There had been nothing. Not a buzz of airships overhead. Not a crackle of boots tromping through the forest. Just the rustle of windswept leaves and their own anxiety to keep them company. The silence and anticipation combined to make both Nita and Dr. Prist keenly aware of the motion approaching from the northwest. Nita instinctively put her hand to the grip of a spud wrench she favored for self-defense. Dr. Prist held her unloaded boot pistol, ready to bluff if the newcomers turned out to be unfriendly.
“There!” Prist said.
High in the trees, eye-gleam flashed. Nita and Prist stared back, each on their feet, ready for whatever might come next. The unseen head jerked a bit, and a far-too-deep chatter chilled their spines. Then came two short whistles. The eye-gleam vanished and the tree rattled with sudden commotion. Then came the crunch of footsteps from the base of the same tree. A strange gentleman emerged from the darkness, marching slowly but confidently toward them. As fug folk went, he was rather diminutive, a match for Nita’s height. He was dressed in the very finest that found and patched clothing had to offer. That included a derby that had been repaired so often it was almost quilted, and a suit jacket with whole sections replaced with ratty fur pelt instead of the usual wool. He had a gun over his shoulder that would have made Gunner’s mouth water. It looked like the sort intended for bird shot, if someone expected the bird to be the size of a horse.
“Ladies?” he said, with something between chivalry and swagger. “Fancy meeting you in The Thicket.”
“Do you represent the…” Nita paused. Their dealings with these people were limited. So limited that the precise name for their little band was something of a mystery. The grunts called them savages, but that hardly seemed a diplomatic bit of terminology.
“Traders,” he helpfully supplied. “I’d say ‘who else would you find in this part of The Thicket?’ but, well, here you are. … You’re that Calderan girl. From the Wind Breaker crew.”
“That’s right. And this is Dr. Prist of the Well Diggers.”
“Right, right. Over at that Ichor Well place. We’ve been selling your boys meat and skins on the regular.” He gestured at the empty net hanging overhead. “You set this off?”
“Yes. We are in a terrible hurry and we hoped it would get someone’s attention,” Prist said.
“You got mine, but I’m not happy about it. These things are a pain to set.” He tipped his head. “That arm looks rather painful.”
“It is. Thank you for your concern,” Prist said.
“Well, I’m here now. What’d you want?”
“We want a ride to Ichor Well,” Nita said.
“We aren’t a ferry service.”
“Sir, my crew is scattered across the fug, my dear friend is in dire trouble, and we are in need of help. If you provide it, you will be owed a significant favor from the Wind Breaker crew. I think you and your associates can appreciate how useful that might be.”
The man whistled. An enormous, vicious-looking creature emerged from the darkness. If it had been a few pounds, it would have been called a squirrel. But this beast looked like someone had put a baggier, fluffier pelt on a tiger, puffed up its tail, and given it chisels for teeth. It was a squarrel, and the saddle and bridle didn’t serve to take an ounce of the madness from its twisted, grinning expression.
The man climbed onto its back quite casually, talking all the while. “You’re talking to the wrong fellow, I’m afraid. We don’t make any decisions about outsiders without talking to the man in charge. And I’ve got a job to do right now. I’ve got to reset this trap, then there’s two more to check.”
Nita sighed. She reached into one of the pouches on her tool sash. “You may have noticed there hasn’t been very much trith floating around lately,” she said.
“There’s never much trith in these parts. If you think a bag of sea salt is going to change my mind…”
She pulled out a small sack and rattled it. Trith had a fairly distinctive sound, and judging by how quickly he coaxed the squarrel back down the tree to investigate, it was clear this was a man who’d heard the sound of trith washers rattling against one another before. His steed surged up to Nita with startling speed and he hopped off. Before he could snatch it from her, she pulled it back.
“This sack now, and two of them when we are safely delivered to Ichor Well.”
“Let me see the goods,” he said.
She opened the sack and dumped it in her palm. The man’s eyes sparkled with avarice. He mounted the squarrel.
“Short one in front, tall one in back. Three’s a pretty heavy load for a mount this size, but we’ll make do.”
“It is rather disheartening how much more persuasive lucre is than righteousness,” Dr. Prist said.
“You can’t buy gin with righteousness, madam,” he said.
Nita and Prist mounted the beast, each holding tight to whatever was available to them. The beast released a buzzing, irritable chatter.
“Heads down, by the way. These branches are vicious.”
He gave two quick whistles with his teeth, and the squarrel bounded off into the forest.
#
A short, harrowing ride later, both women were seated in the cramped interior of the boss’s wagon. He was a man named Lusk, and the sack of trith washers had been emptied onto the plank of a desk beside where his name had been carved. Lusk was somewhat taller, scrawnier, and better dressed than the man who had fetched them. He adjusted small, round spectacles and stacked the washers.
“The Wind Breaker crew…” he muttered in a smoke-roughened voice. He pulled open a small drawer mounted to the wall and placed the washers inside. “You are Nita Graus. And you are Dr. Samantha Prist. Correct?” he said.
“That’s right,” she said. “And we very much need—”
Lusk waved her off. “I’m familiar with the situation. You do much gambling, Miss Graus?”
“Only with my life, it seems.”
He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I like cards, myself. Gives a man a notion of just what the odds are. A bit of skill and intuition and you’ll know if a bet’s worth making. The Wind Breaker is not a hand of cards. The Wind Breaker is a lottery with a very expensive ticket. You paid off nice with that Cipher Hill job. We’re still selling off the goods we grabbed. But I like to quit while I’m ahead with that sort of thing. I stick to cards. And you know who is a good hand at cards?” He leaned forward. “Dr. Wash.”
Nita’s face became stern. “You’re working with him?”
“Have been for years. Tries to swindle us from time to time, but I know how he works. I call his bluffs when I can and fold a deal when I can’t. Risks I can calculate. And once Tusk went away, all the strings he was pulling became loose ends. Working with Dr. Wash has been a very good investment. The man is an expert at tying up loose ends. It’s the sort of thing he pays well for.”
Nita glanced toward the door.
“He’s not here,” Lusk said. “Nor are his men. But we’ve gotten word that we’re to keep our eyes open for members of the Wind Breaker crew and report on what we find.”
Nita shuddered with anger, but the moment passed. “Mr. Lusk, let’s talk gambling. You seem comfortable taking calculated risks with Wash because you are confident you can see his treachery coming. And you say you’re not comfortable with the Wind Breaker crew because we’re not the sort of gambling you enjoy.”
“Correct.”
“That’s because we aren’t a gamble. You don’t need to bet on when someone is going to stab you in the back with us. We make deals, we make promises, and we protect our own. You’re a decent man, or at least a reasonable one. I know this because your people have crossed paths with the Well Diggers at Ichor Well and we haven’t had to fend off a flood of attackers ever since, so you can keep a secret when you know it won’t do you any harm to do it. I’m not asking you to risk anything for us. I’m not asking you to place a wager or up the ante. Because your trust and your help is an investment, and it’ll pay off.”
“So I’ve been told. Two more packets of trith washers.” He knocked on the drawer where he’d stowed them. “Funny thing about trith washers, Ms. Graus. Everyone knows where they come from. I can’t invest in both the Wind Breaker and Wash. Once I throw in with you, after he made his position clear, that’ll be the end of our association with the masked man, and he might not take it well.”
“I’m not going to issue an ultimatum. I’m not going to tell you it is us or him. Because, and I say this without an ounce of bravado or rancor, when this is through, that’s not a decision you’ll have to make. We took the gamble with Wash. He turned on us. Or more accurately, he was against us since the beginning. So this doesn’t end until either we’re gone or he is. Because the Wind Breaker crew is endlessly loyal, but that leaves no room for mercy.”
“And what about those of us who worked with him? Where do we shake out in this little exchange of vendettas?”
“I wouldn’t worry about us coming after you. But everything you invested in Wash will go down with him. And it would be awfully useful to have a little something invested in the Wind Breaker.”
Lusk drummed his fingers on the plank. “Lil Cooper is in trouble?”
“Dire trouble. Wash has her, and as you might imagine, he hasn’t got her best interests at heart.”
“To date, you and Lil are the only surface folk to ever ride one of our beasts. And the critters made it back alive. Albeit on their own.”
“I recall. It was a memorable experience.”
He drew in a long, slow breath through his nostrils. “Step outside with me for a moment.”
Nita and Prist stood. The boss flipped his plank desk up and sidled past them to lead them through the door.
“You would be surprised how many of these beasts roam the forest. You wouldn’t think there was enough to eat in the whole of The Thicket to keep them fed. But then, I suppose when a beast will eat just about anything, it doesn’t take much.”
He paced slowly through the nomadic village he and the other traders had set up. The nearest thing to a permanent component to the village was a light but sturdy bit of fencing that enclosed a particularly strange squarrel. It was hanging from the top of the cage, bowing the long rods that made up the bars. Its eyes were rather odd as well, seeming to dart about independently of one another. When they came near, it focused on them and released a hoarse chatter that sounded more like a honk than the usual vocalization.
“They come in all shapes and sizes. Some are fighters. Some are climbers. Some are too clever to hang on to, breaking our locks and unraveling our lashing. And then there’s this one.” He thumped the cage. “Thick as last week’s porridge. Fast though. And strong. If it was brighter, it’d be one of my better beasts. As it is, I don’t even have to put a lock on the cage. The thing can’t work a latch. I’m frankly amazed it can remember its commands.”
He turned and raised his voice. “Boys! How many do we have in camp right now?”
A motley crew of a dozen or so hunters and trappers assembled before him like troops awaiting review.
“Tell you what, boys. I’ve got a good feeling about the traps to the northwest. How about all of you head out and give them a check. Stay close. That’s where that fug bear was, last time we encountered it. If you bring that in, I’ve got a buyer who’ll make our season.”
The group acknowledged the orders. Within a minute they’d all grabbed their gear and ventured off, leaving Lusk and the girls alone in the camp.
“I’ve got some figures to work on. I’ll be inside for about fifteen minutes. After that, I’ll be out to lock you girls up. Don’t go doing anything foolish. If you do, I’ll have to spread the word that you’ve been through here.”
“Understood,” Nita said.
He nodded and added gruffly. “Say hello to Lil for me.”
He slipped back into his wagon. Dr. Prist and Nita were alone. Nita stepped up to the crude gate of the enclosure. She gave a short, sharp whistle, somewhat muted by the mask. The creature tilted its head to look down at her, both eyes slowly focusing. She whistled again. It simply released its grip on the roof and plopped onto its back, then rolled over to right itself.
“Are we… planning on riding that thing?” Dr. Prist said.
“He may as well have offered it to us,” Nita said.
“He said he would send word if we escaped.”
“Hedging his bets,” Nita said.
She whistled what she was reasonably certain was the command to lower himself to be mounted. He honked twice, then plopped down with his legs splayed. Dr. Prist looked at the creature doubtfully.
“I am not entirely convinced Lusk isn’t trying to get us killed.”
Nita climbed to the creature’s back. Dr. Prist, somewhat more cautiously, climbed on behind her. She held tight as best she could with her one good arm. Nita briefly grappled with the need to recall how to ride one of these creatures and the desire to forget just how chaotic it had been. She raised the reins.
“Wait!” Prist said. “Don’t we have to name it? Isn’t it some sort of superstition for sailors if they sail a ship with no name?”
“I don’t think that applies to squarrels. And I wouldn’t think you’d be the superstitious type.”
“At this moment, I will take any opportunity to improve our chances, scientific or otherwise.”
“Fine. Then we’ll name him…”
Nita looked down. The squarrel twisted his head sideways and swiveled one eye to stare at her. He honked.
“Goose,” she decide. “Onward, Goose!”