Chapter 7

  *BAMF*

  Thankfully, this jump was a bit less firebally than my first. In fact, other than a slight, unpleasant building of pressure in my body and then a sudden transition from the dead of night to midday, it was a downright pleasant experience. I didn’t land on my face or take any damage. One moment I was atop a pile of old castle, the next I was here, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the new setting.

  Said setting, however, was weird. I already mentioned how I transitioned instantly from night to day, which was already strange. Stranger still was that there was no visible sun. The sky was a uniform blue, bright, vibrant, but no matter where I looked there was no variation, no change in hue or contrast as if I was looking at an impossibly big blue canvas. Two or three puffy white clouds hung in the air as well a few hundred feet down below.

  Oh yes, the weirdest part. Belle and I were standing atop a rock platform about the size of a house, but below said rock platform was air. I turned in a slow circle, making the smallest, most calculated movements of which I was capable. I wasn’t sure why. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Our platform didn’t feel entirely still, like we were in the process of spinning or maybe wobbling. Whatever it was, I could feel the movement instinctually, just still enough to be stable but not quite rock solid, and, somehow, I knew we weren’t resting atop anything. Around us, in every direction, other rocks were similarly floating impossibly above the clouds, lazily drifting in the breeze and being casually impossible.

  Then, when I was done with my look around, I gathered my courage and wandered over to the side of our platform to take a peek over the edge to find nothing but air, more clouds, and more blue, just as bright as the rest of the sky. Our rock didn’t show any sign of tipping when I got to the edge, thankfully. Instead, smaller rocks materialized from under our platform spinning into place directly where I was trying to look until they finally settled into a roughly foot wide circle. The motion was so sudden, it startled me, and I did an involuntary, staggering lurch back. My legs collapsed as every climbing instinct in my body told me to lower my center of gravity until it couldn’t get any lower.

  After that, I just stared up at the sky and focused on calming my growing vertigo.

  Belle’s face appeared in my vision after a moment, blotting out part of the too-perfect blue of the sky. She giggled as I laid there, hands on her knees and red cheeked.

  “Now I can stop recording. Glad to see something about you is normal, newbie,” she laughed. She produced her wrist computer thingy and activated the holo, poking one of the buttons. “After that thing with the skeletons, I thought maybe Mr. White had lied to us. Like maybe we were just cover for some underhanded CA espionage thing, but you just put that theory to bed. Can’t fake a reaction like that.”

  I frowned at her, but I couldn’t rise to the level of being annoyed or angry. Her teasing gave me something to focus on other than the open air all around us at least. “Glad I could clear things up. Definitely not a spy,.” I gulped once my breathing was back under control. My mouth was still dry, and my throat felt tight.

  “So, floating rocks. That’s… um… novel,” I said, finally coming upon the right word.

  Belle checked her wrist computer again and tapped on the little glass orb where the projector probably was. “Yeah, a lot of the clean jumps are sketch-ish. Real weird.” She squinted at the display once more. “Gizelle was right behind you, right?”

  “Far as I know,” I answered, considering mentioning the explosion just before I’d made the jump. Gizelle would probably say something about it when she got here. “She was saying something before I jumped, but I didn’t catch it all.”

  Deception is now level 11.

  Hey! I didn’t even lie that time, you jerk!

  “Accepted the prompt right away again, eh? You really need to stop that,” Belle chided.

  True. No prompt had appeared for this jump either. What did that mean? I was already atypical for Exotics in a lot of ways, but why this way? I had nothing but questions. Questions and no one to ask. Belle seemed like a good enough person, but she was literally being paid to shepherd me. Once that contract was up, would she keep any of my secrets? I didn’t think so, especially if my status of ‘former demon’ came up. If that little nugget was big enough to shut down an entire planet, it was probably big enough to sell.

  That thought passed through my psyche like a cold wind, and a profound sense of melancholy swept over me. I literally had no one in this universe I could trust. Very few in my home universe too. Even on Ralqir, I’d never felt this far from home. At least on Ralqir I’d had good people around me.

  “Newbie? You okay?” The Pathfinder woman’s expression had gone from pleasant to concerned sometime when I wasn’t paying attention. She offered me a hand to get me back on my feet.

  Say something. That’s what a normal person would do.

  I needed to be a normal person for just a little while longer. Once I got to Sabium, maybe then I could fall apart.

  “Sorry. Did you say something?” I asked as I consciously put my mask back into place.

  Harmless. Unbothered.

  “Oh it’s fine. Was just talking about how you handled evil monsters from beyond the grave a lot better than our little island getaway here,” she said, hauling me to my feet with a grunt.

  “Oh. Yeah. Undead were part of my tutorial,” I answered vaguely.

  Belle quirked an eyebrow at that. “Really? You a necromancer or something? A Nom-Combat necromancer?”

  “Uh-”

  “No wait. You’re Non-Combat, and you make stuff. Let’s see…” She put her hand to her chin and thought for a moment before snapping her fingers and pointing at my chest. “Oh. Oh! Okay. Tell me if I’m close: You make weapons out of the souls of the damned. Please tell me I’m right, because that would be just stupendous, and I want one.”

  *BAMF*

  In a puff of displaced air, Gizelle appeared next to us. She was breathing hard, her skin beaded with sweat, and her punch dagger was out of its sheath.

  “Giz? What kept you?” Belle gasped.

  Gizelle took deep, greedy gulps of air before she answered. “The ruins. They’ve collapsed.”

  Belle made a rude noise with her tongue. “Yeah. Obviously,” she replied dismissively.

  “No,” the taller Pathfinder countered with a shake of her head. “I mean the rest of the way. Devastated. A plume of dust hundreds of feet high.”

  “Oh, God, we were just down there,” Belle realized, turning to me. “Unlucky for Proxis, I guess. They’re gonna have a hell of a time digging the jump out again.”

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  Then she gasped as another realization hit her. “Then there’s the skellies… They’ll have to dig them out too. The jump’s going to be down for weeks before it’s safe.”

  Oh, good. That was the idea.

  Gizelle lowered the canteen she’d been drinking out of and wiped her mouth. “Lots of people are going to be angry at you, Kotes.”

  I tried to look sufficiently frightened and very much not like a fugitive who’d just bought himself a little more breathing room.

  Belle gave me a sympathetic look even as she rested a comforting hand on her partner’s back. “Yeah. Maybe don’t go home for a little while, newbie. I mean, sure, there was a monster nest down there, but as long as trade was flowing, Proxis’ Chosen would have been fine ignoring it. Now, nobody’s gonna do business through that jump until it’s cleared.”

  So, I was another step ahead of the law. Unless I was worth more than the entirety of Proxis’ intergalactic trade, the Marshals were going to have their hands full for a while.

  Gizelle, having finally caught her breath, gave Belle’s hand a little squeeze then flipped the little shotgun construct around to present it to me butt first.

  “Handy little thing,” She said as I took hold of it but when I tried to pull it away, she held on tightly, forcing me to contest her strength. I didn’t try. Somehow that just made the suspicious frown she wore deepen. “Makes me wonder what else you can do.”

  Belle grinned obliviously and waggled her eyebrows. “Oh, I’ve got his Class all figured out, Giz. Soul Smith. Ooh. No. Gunsmith of the Damned.”

  —----------------------

  “Sketch-ish. See?” Belle asked as we finally set foot on ‘solid’ ground again. Solid ground, meaning one of the bigger floating boulders that made up most of the solid matter in this place.

  “That’s still not a word,” Gizelle argued implacably.

  Belle turned back to her partner and threw up her hands in exasperation. “Well I can’t use sketchy. That would imply like… evil or something.”

  The rocky path behind us, in a dizzying display of geological ballet that made your heart flutter and your sense of dread sit up and take notice, waivered and undulated perceptibly now that we were no longer walking on it, then fell away, tumbling into the infinite blue down below until they were too far away to track. No matter how many times I’d seen it happen, it never got any less terrifying. When you were on the little stepping stones they were solid enough, allowing you to traverse the long, empty parts between different rock shelves, but seeing them just fall away like that tricked your brain into believing you’d just narrowly avoided death.

  “Then use a different word. A real one,” Gizelle said.

  “Words are all made up anyway. They’re not even real,” Belle insisted.

  Gizelle rolled her shoulders to resituate her pack. “Of course they are. They’re descriptive. That’s how words work.”

  “They’re only real because we agree they’re real. They’re all made up, see? Sketch-ish: a thing that’s like a sketch.” Belle made a grand, sweeping gesture at the weird blue sky and the floating boulders as if that would make us understand.

  “So, this place is connected to a whole bunch of other universes, and they’re all clean jumps?” I asked, mostly as a method to trick my endocrine system into lowering the adrenaline levels a bit. I always thought I’d avoided acquiring a fear of heights, but this place was making me consider picking one up. Would I just fall forever if my attention wavered at the wrong time? The thought made me shudder.

  Belle made a so-so gesture with her hand. “Well, all the universes are connected in a bunch of places,” she explained. “The difference here is scale. Our ‘verse is probably bumping up against a shit ton of other realities, but we’ll probably never find them all because they’re spread over an infinite expanse of vacuum and burning gas. This universe is tiny, relatively speaking.”

  Gizelle put her wrist holo up to her face and peered inside, back to being the guide for our little troupe. She turned, holding the display up so that it aligned with a rock in the distance. “There’s the place. One more walk.”

  We’d actually passed several jump points since we’d arrived, but none of them had been ours. I could feel them pulling at me when we passed, like a beggar clutching at your clothes. They seemed to desperately want me to let myself go, get pulled in. I resisted the urge as best I could, mostly by staying near the edges of our rocks, which didn’t do my budding acrophobia any favors.

  “Seems weird,” I said, purposefully not looking down into the bottomless sky where our path would eventually form so we could take our walk. “It’s too empty. It’s just rocks and sky.”

  “Looks like it’s not done, doesn’t it?” Belle asked, pausing momentarily to look back at me.

  I nodded like a good student, picking up on the fact that she was leading the conversation somewhere.

  “Like there should be more, right?” Belle raised an eyebrow, her self-satisfied grin just barely peaking from behind her serious expression. Then she gestured to me with an open hand as if prompting me to finish her sentence. “It’s…”

  “Sketch…ish?” I replied.

  Belle beamed. Gizelle groaned in disgust.

  “It’s a sketch! It’s like the place knows what it wants to be, but it’s not done yet,” the red haired Pathfinder explained with enthusiasm.

  I frowned, not quite satisfied with that answer. That didn’t make any sense.

  “He’s got the look,” Gizelle observed, shaking her head. “He’s literally going to a school. Don’t fill his head with your nonsense right before he receives a proper education.”

  “Aw, c’mon!” Belle pouted, hands on her hips. “I’ve got more hours abroad than most Chosen twice my age. There’s academic knowledge, then there’s experience.”

  I turned Belle’s words over in my head, specifically how she’d worded her descriptions. It wanted… How did a universe want? “So, wait. It’s… alive?” I asked after a few heartbeats.

  Belle gestured to me, triumph on her face. “See? He got there by himself.”

  “Absolutely not. Not alive in the way we can possibly understand,” Gizelle corrected, rubbing at her eyes like a headache was coming on while treating every word as a chore. “That doesn’t stop some Chosen from saying so.”

  Belle spread her arms and did a big circle before posing, game show host style. “Newbie, you’re inside a cosmic parasite! Ta-da!”

  I felt my eyebrows furrow as I turned the idea over in my head. “A parasite for what? Where’s the host?”

  “Us, my dear boy” Belle answered, pushing her goggles farther up on her nose.

  I got the sudden urge to check my Status Screen for debuffs or missing stats.

  “Not us, us,” Gizelle corrected. “Our home. Our universe. That’s the theory, at least.”

  “Beasties such as these are sucking the reality juice right out of our metaphorical juice box,” Belle continued. “And it’ll keep doing it until it’s taken it all.”

  “You’re kidding-”

  “Oh look, here we are. Once you go through here, you’ll have gone six hundred relative light years in just under a day. Not our fastest run but a good one,” Belle announced with a bright grin. We’d just stepped foot onto the next floating rock platform, and I heard the telltale sound of the path behind us crumbling away.

  “Now that’s just mean, Bee,” Gizelle grumbled, though she had a rare smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

  I turned from one woman to the other. “Hold on. What? What did you mean by that?”

  “Best not think about it.” Belle teased. “Though if you want my advice, don’t make any long term investments with returns further out than a few billion years. See you around, newbie,” she said before I asked more questions, sticking out a hand for me to shake. “Make sure to write. When I see you again, I want that soul pistol, okay? Not just any soul either. A fighty one.”

  I blinked, just now noticing the pull from the jump point. This was the place, was it? “Uh. You’re not coming all the way?” I asked, suddenly a bit apprehensive.

  “Sabium’s a dead end,” Belle said. “‘Far as the Pathfinders are concerned. Dead end in a lot of ways, actually. No way out other than the way you came in.”

  “Take care of yourself, Kotes,” Gizelle said, reaching out for my hand as well which I took. Her grip was strong but not overbearing. She stared into my eyes, serious. Did I also detect a note of worry there? “Be better than them.”

  I gave her a questioning look, but, in Gizelle fashion, she didn’t elaborate further.

  Belle slapped me on the shoulder. “Go on now. Remember. A fighty soul pistol.”

  I smile politely at her and nodded to both of them in turn. “I’ll remember.”

  Belle grinned. Gizelle nodded stoically.

  Then I let myself go.

  *BAMF*

  Again, no fire, no freezing cold. Just a slight build of pressure and then I felt cold metal against my palm. I was kneeling, one hand on some kind of metal decking, smooth with a finely textured finish. In front of me…

  There was a window. No. The entire wall was a window, perfectly transparent to the point where I could barely detect the glass.

  Beyond the glass… billions upon billions of… stars.

  Hey. Thanks for giving In my Defense a chance. New chapters will be posted Tuesdays and Thursdays, eventually ramping up depending on the amount of interest we can generate here.

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