Page 72 of The Only Way Out Is Up

“For dangerous Twisted.”

“Ah.” Ky looks thoughtful. “So we do that again.”

“Without a combat body for Star, we’ll have to start at the very bottom. It’ll take forever. We only have a month until the Ascent.”

Ky puts a hand in her pocket and pulls out a little pouch. She spills the contents onto the table: steel coins, mostly single bits and a couple of centys. “This is everything I have left. Can you use it to build something basic and speed things up a little?”

I stare at her: bruised, battered, cut, and concussed, offering the last scraps of her worldly wealth to get one more throw of the dice. I feel a slight grin tugging at my lips.

“You really never give up, do you?”

“Not so far,” she says. “But I could say the same for you, couldn’t I?”

TWENTY-FOUR

Time slips by. Three weeks till the Ascent.

With Ky’s little hoard I buy sigils and supplies from Ekkeban. It’s a fraction of what I’d been spending a few weeks ago; he raises an eyebrow but says nothing. (Sudden rises and abrupt falls are common among his customers, I suppose.) I take Star’s thief body to pieces and rip up my climbing gloves and kneepads for sigils and threading wire. The result is something reminiscent of my early years, visibly janky and unstable. It works, after a fashion, but it’s fragile without RESIST-enhanced armor. One solid hit would wreck it.

[Conclusion: then I will not get hit.] Star twirls his fighting limbs, clearly overjoyed to be back in a body at all.

That’s the idea. We’ll play it safe for now. The relatively weak Twisted at the bottom of the bounty board pay a pittance, but I can strip them for sigils and wire. Without even the tenuous safety net of Bug Zapper, I can’t afford to get into trouble again. Fortunately, simple Twisted are even dumber than the idiot; all they know how to do is come straight at you in a mass of twisted metal. Star gets the drop on them and tears them to pieces in seconds.

Back home, Ameliana returns several times to check on our wounds and (I suspect) to keep a suspicious eye on Ky. Ky, for her part, is unfailingly courteous to everyone. Our circumstances must seem unbearably primitive to her; I keep waiting for her to show some disgust at our pit toilets, our pathetic little tin bath, our food that’s just endless variations on mash. But she only smiles and eats happily and tells stories about Hod to Spike.

Somi and I exchange few words, but few are needed. He knows something must have gone badly wrong for me to have brought Ky here, and he knows I’m doing everything I can to fix it. He doesn’t even question that I’m putting every bit I earn into rebuilding Star. He trusts me, right at the point where I’m no longer sure I deserve it.

Because the ugly truth is that I’m not moving fast enough. The Ascent is getting closer, and at this rate Star’s new body isn’t even going to match the Mark 4, let alone be enough of an improvement to stand a chance.

When she’s feeling well enough, Ky accompanies me to the market. She’s washed and scrubbed by now, and she wears a dress borrowed from Ameliana, taken in with a few stitches to fit her slimmer frame. She taught Spike to braid her hair, and I spent most of an evening feeling a bit jealous of my younger sister as she ran her fingers through the long silver tresses. Now Ky has it pinned up in a thick club-like tail, tucked away under a shapeless cap. It makes her look more ordinary, but she still draws plenty of admiring eyes.

She asks questions about everything she sees, and I find myself blushing from embarrassment on behalf of my home. Yes, those are pig troughs, and that’s a shit wagon. There’s the little fountain where the whores wash their privates between clients; you can also cleanse your ass with it after you use the outhouse. Oh look, here comes the man selling pig bladders stuffed with mash and turnips, they’re delicious. Even Malkuth, with its tight-packed squalor, now seems like a beacon of civilization compared to this. Ky’s curiosity seems genuine, though, and she never complains.

“Where do you get the bounties?” she asks as we weave between busy tables.

“There’s bounty boards all over.” I point to a bounty-man’s stall with its broad chalkboard, which has a list that mirrors the one in Ekkeban’s shop. “Nobody wants to deal directly with the Arbiters, so you take your kill to the bounty-man and he’ll buy it for a little discount.”

“Can we look?”

“Sure.”

We stroll over. I peer at the bottom of the list, where the ever-changing entries for my usual prey are posted. Nothing promising since my last check, which is unfortunate; I’m starting to think I’ve picked this whole area clean of easy money. It might be worth going after something a little more dangerous, but Star is still too vulnerable—

“What’s a rotwurm?” Ky says.

I’ve gotten out of the habit of looking at the top of the board. It never changes: Rotwurm, 200 s.

“Does that mean stripes?” Ky says. “Two hundred stripes?”

A couple of nearby hunters are giving us odd looks. “Doesn’t matter,” I mutter.

“Why not?”

I take her arm and pilot her away from the stall. “Because it’s Rotwurm. It’s been out there since before I was born. Nobody can kill it.”

“Says who?”

“Says about a thousand dead people.” I see the look in her eye and sigh. “Seriously, Ky, forget it.”