Tag: chapter

Chapter Fourteen

Saori’s car was a disaster.

This was not news. It was, in fact, one of the first things I had noted about her, and it had continued to hold true since. “Saori’s car is a glorious disasterpiece composed of the most bizarre, disturbing, and confusing shit you will have seen today” was just a maxim I had learned about interacting with her. As with most such maxims, it hadn’t taken long for this lesson to sink in.

What I now learned was that this rule applied more extensively than I’d quite realized. She’d had this car less than forty-eight hours, and it was already every bit as strange as the last. She had her usual array, the things that never varied: Emergency gear, medical kit, dice and cards, acetylene cutting torch and sledgehammer, spray paint and rope. Those things were in the car because they were useful, and as a result they stayed there.

But she had also accumulated quite a bit of truly strange shit already. To sit down, I had to move a bag containing about twenty mood rings, a toaster which appeared to be operated by hand-crank, and a plastic box with dozens of restaurant coupons. Being a fool who never seemed to learn, I gave in to curiosity and examined the latter somewhat before putting it in back. All of the coupons were from other cities, I was pretty sure, and it looked at a glance like they were all expired.…

Chapter Thirteen

“Tell me you’ve got something.” I was trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. I wasn’t sure how well it was working.

“You’re in luck.” Toby, for his part, sounded smug. “I’ve got quite a bit, I think. There’s something…odd happening, and I’m pretty sure it’s related to your target.”

“Great, hit me.”

“We’re not playing blackjack,” he told me. “But if you want to lose, we can later. Kinda busy with something else at the moment.”

I sighed, and wondered why everyone I met not only had to be a smartass, they also apparently all learned how from the same style guide. “What did you get, then?”…

Chapter Twelve

Sleep sucked. Sleep sucked hard, with great enthusiasm and impressive creativity. I’d always been prone to nightmares and assorted other issues with sleep, for as long as I could remember. I thought that probably made sense, all things considered. It wasn’t every night or anything, though there were times that it felt like it. But they were frequent, and I’d never really found anything that helped. I’d tried a wide array of medications when I was younger, along with every kind of meditation, sleep hygiene pattern, and lifehack I could come up with.

None of it had ever done much. The nightmares still happened, with about the same frequency, severity, and surrealism regardless of what interventions I had tried, until eventually I gave up on preventing them and focused more on just making the surrounding experiences tolerable, adding various sensory comforts. I mostly didn’t have those here, but Raincloud was helpful with that; an actual dog was often better for tactile comfort than a plush one.

But the nightmares themselves hadn’t gotten any better, and this was a bad one. It was dark, and I was lost, and there was something else in the darkness with me. I didn’t know what it was, and I had no idea where it was at all. But it was harrying me, sometimes just a menacing unseen presence, other times suddenly closing in and tearing at me with long, vicious claws.…

Chapter Eleven

“You stole this.” I sounded incredulous, probably because I was.

Saori grinned at me lazily. “I prefer the term ‘liberated,’ actually,” she told me. She sounded smug, probably because she was.

“Sure,” I said. “But out of all the cars you could have picked, you liberated this?”

Saori looked at the car. It remained the same. The overall structure was ordinary enough, a sedan with pretensions of being a sports car. But I wasn’t sure how she’d even found a car painted quite this eye-searingly neon green.

“Yes? Are you surprised?” the kitsune asked me.…

Chapter Ten

It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. It seemed like nothing was ever that simple, particularly with me around. But in this case, the complications were less the product of my tendency to attract bizarre complications, and more just a matter of scheduling. I had a few people to call, and between time zones and their scheduling patterns, none of them were going to be available for a while.

I ended up sitting at a diner to wait. It was a cheap greasy-spoon style of restaurant, just barely on the right side of trashy—the kind of place you go to because the bars are closed and you aren’t ready to go home yet. It was almost empty at this hour, and the building layout obviously hadn’t been intended as a restaurant, leaving some tables in very out-of-the-way corners.

It was, in short, perfect for my needs. I wasn’t hungry, but as a place to sit and call shady people, this was pretty good. I ordered something to pick at, found a small table in the corner, and settled in to wait. I was alone, and it was quiet. Saori had gone to acquire a car, something she phrased in exactly that way. She hadn’t said how she planned to do that so casually, and I hadn’t asked. Once Raincloud heard how long I was going to take here, she’d opted to go with Saori without an instant of hesitation.…

Chapter Nine

Explosions are intrinsically loud.

This was not exactly a startling, original observation. It was also an understatement of comical proportion. Even the relatively small explosions involved in gunfire are spectacularly loud, far more so than most people would imagine. Something smaller like a twenty-two gauge rifle or nine millimeter pistol round might be in line with their imagination. Those are still noisy, but they’re not incredibly so. Larger firearms, though, are loud enough that the shotgun blast earlier had been physically painful and left my ears ringing.

I discovered now that this did not in any way prepare me for the experience of a car bomb. The noise alone was miserably painful, and between that and the pressure wave, I lost track of my surroundings for a few moments. The world went white, and I was falling. Or maybe flying through the air; I couldn’t tell which way was up, so it was kinda hard to tell. Everything hurt and I had no idea what was going on. I might have outright lost consciousness. It was hard to tell.…