Chapter 10: Chapter 10

As it turned out, Pip's speed wasn't enough to compensate for her system's innate refusal to spawn weapons inside solid matter. She did, however, send shrapnel flying into Susan's chin, chest, and upper arms.

The waitress staggered backward, legs bumping against the couch. She wobbled, dizzy, now bleeding and punctured. The wound in her chin was surprisingly deep. Pip patted herself on the back for that one.

She wasn't putting up a fight.

So Pip took inspiration from Jacob, who was watching from the floor. He would've been motionless if not for the wracking pain coursing constantly through his body now. Sad to see him lying there, wasn't it?

In honor of Jacob, she would try something new-ish.

Parlor tricks were things she enjoyed in theory but could never wrap her head around. Any deception above the level of pointing somewhere you weren't and declaring that "I'm over there" was beyond her. But when she got her system, she discovered she could cheat a little bit.

With Discretion, she could turn her lousy sleight-of-hand into slightly better sleight-of-hand. And who knows? Maybe an additional split second of misdirection would matter someday.

Pip brought her hands behind her back and tried to look demure. She said in a coo, "You're not doing so well, are you, miss? I tried to help you, but clearly you're not so nice after all.

Iron—Discretion, hands.

Now swing.

She aimed for Susan's head and brought the pointed end against the side of her head. Her aim was true. And Susan's eyes didn't turn to see until a moment before they came dislodged.

As her body fell to the floor, Pip reflected on how shockingly easy it was to kill certain things—certain pests, certain people. How terribly hard it was for her to muster sympathy for royalty. Funny how a vicious mutineer could seem more human than a person literally born into manipulative scumbaggery, eh?

And yet, as she watched Jacob writhe on the floor, as she saw him trying to keep himself upright for minutes after the death and then, finally, buckling and passing out...she knew she had gone beyond mere companionship with him. You can be "friends" with your boss if that's where the money is. You can make yourself like it. But this feeling...

It was pity. Pip was starting to feel bad for him.

***

"Land ho!"

It had appeared in the early morning darkness, a distant clump so indistinct that it could've been an illusion, like a blotch on a hot paved road.

The Known World's Fair was charting a slow, steady, and strategic course. The official grand opening would take place just as the boat docked on a sky island, on a wonderful morning forecasted to be free of monsters or turbulence.

Several guests spent that early morning sleepless, sitting before their windows, asking, What is it like? Well, haven't you seen the pictures? Yes, but...

Pictures were never the same as being there. Jacob slept in a disordered, bloody room as the majority of the passengers piled out onto the deck, reveling in a strangely sweet morning mist.

Part of this island had been preserved. It looked so unbalanced it'd fall over. Underneath the towering crystal formations were pan-flutes of stone, the pipes of a church organ blown up monumental. Over the browns and asbestos-yellows twinkled crystals of every color, the hues swirling and sanding together. Each crystal spire had a dominant color: orange, yellow or blue.

It was majestic...half of it. The same couldn't be said for most of the conquered islands. And if you hadn't been to any, there was practically no difference. The crowd cheered and applauded the way they would after a good opera. A few were unimpressed, but clapped to keep up appearances.

The other half of the island had been denuded of trees and razed of most of its grass. Some of the lumpy rock was smothered by the fur tents of crystal pickers. Some was shadowed by tall metal planks standing like a clique of moai. These were all angled and positioned for maximum surface area, the better to catch crystals that the pickers could scour and scrape.

That scraping was in progress when the Known World's Fair came into view. Pickers, whether hanging from ropes and harnesses on the metal, huddled in alcoves on the island's stalactite-dense underside, or simply crouching over pickaxes, turned and gawked and waved.

"Ladies and gentlemen," announced Sir Huxley from a pedestal on deck, the place where a wheel would be on an ocean ship, "what you're seeing is Rock Stump Island. Not the first-discovered nor the most glamorous of skylands, but she is a workhorse. This island alone produces a full sixtieth of all magic crystal in circulation! As you can see, she does so without sacrificing all of her beauty, and that is the most wondrous part."

He went on to describe the island's founding, the fossils excavated, the stunningly well-preserved cycad seeds. Apparently Sir Huxley was unaware that most of the guests had moved on from dinosaurs. Those were yesterday's news, and they craved more. The fair would be only too happy to deliver...

A huge thoomp rattled the ship, but it was only routine. The Known World's Fair had docked. With an anchor in the stalactites and a gangplank fancy enough to have guardrails, it permitted its guests to roam Rock Stump Island for a while as employees gave the pickers fresh food and a refill of rations.

The thoomp woke Jacob up. He became aware that the ship wasn't moving, and the feeling of being so motionless again made him nauseous. What else was new.

A dead body was in the room. It didn't smell too bad yet. So far, the strongest odor came from the blood speckling the floor just beside him.

He slid himself upright.

Pip was sitting on the armchair, reading or pretending to. He had a feeling she'd been up all night, and not out of love for him.

Any warm feelings for Pip he'd been on the verge of generating were swept away by the memories, the jumbled information, of the night before.

Someone had put an assassin on him. No, most likely not an assassin. Just a pawn to carry the Curse, then die in supreme satisfaction. Someone who wanted him to squirm before he died.

Which someone? Based on the wording of the Curse, he couldn't help but assume it had been one of his brothers: Prince James the Just.

It was an assumption, one he'd been prodded into making. The culprit could have been an ambitious second-in-line prince eager to put down all competition. It could also have been Prince John the Valiant, first in line, giving himself job security. It could also have been Malcolm. Sir Huxley. Pip—or a stranger—just anyone else.

It could have been Susan and Susan alone, a waitress deluding herself into thinking that bestowing a Curse on Jacob would make her some important piece of history.

Susan...a woman with a Waitress-Class System? But what would she be doing with Curse?

Among all the whirling thoughts turning Jacob's brain into a howling hive, this, at least, seemed certain enough: that woman had been not a mere employee, but a full-fledged royal.

Let's go back to the totally-unprovables, Jake, he said to himself.

Moments before adding, It's not. Nothing's unprovable.

I'm...not sure that makes sense, he told himself.

But it made enough sense if you had enough determination, and he needed something as reliable as that—if not proof, then his own will to get it—if he was going to move in spite of this all-consuming Curse.

Well, as for momentarily unprovables, it seemed that for as long as he stayed on this ship, he couldn't try and prove whether or not his brothers had any direct connection to this. They had distant alibis: John was down on the planet's surface and James was, though sailing through the sky, scheduled to be over a whole different cluster of countries. Jacob noted that it seemed very James-like to have his dirty work done while he was at least five hundred miles off. Jacob also noted that it seemed very un-John-like to do anything besides shout his opponent's name and declare a very public fight to the death.

But as for reasonably provables...

He turned, at last, to the corpse.

The body that had carried the Curse like a pathogen. Whose identity no one, apparently, even knew.

And that was odd. From where Jacob was lying, he could see that face, partially shattered yet still smiling. He could see the scar. It wasn't like she was disfigured. It wasn't like she was from beyond the Fifth Sea, either. She had dark hair, and her skin was, maybe, tan. Didn't mean much when Pip's native Alzenian hair was a rich blue-black.

Pip didn't look up from her book when Jacob got up and walked to the radio by the door.

The short walk wasn't painful for him, not even hard, but he'd call it...intense. He needed to move slower and focus harder. He got the gist now: his body's limits were technically the same, muscle mass and basic potential as high as they'd ever been, but an intangible thing was pressing them lower. Pressing him down below those thresholds, keeping his head underwater. And if he tried to break free, his soul would panic.

...He wondered if the waitress had known about Pip.

Fuck! If it turned out that his brother knew about Pip but not him—

Never mind that.

Never mind the unknown, unknowable bullshit about words that were cognates of every language, or whatever the professor was getting at, that secret code that apparently required a system to access...

Just buzz in on this radio and call about the body.

Beeeeep.

"Hello, front desk?"

"Front desk speaking," replied a voice through the typical fuzz.

"Yes. This is Prince Jacob speaking. Repeat: Prince Jacob. There is a dead body on the floor of my room."

As he went on, Pip finally looked up. As a would-have-been murderer herself, she was keen to hear the greatest alibi of all: "I'm pretty much beyond the law."

"...Yes, she's the same waitress. I can assure you that she's not the person that management thinks she is. I want a full background check on her. A new one. Don't care if it's impossible. Just tell your boss, he likes me. ...Yes, it was in self-defense," he said, with a sigh that implied an "as if you should care." "Tried to stick me with a syringe." (Which he now suspected contained sugar water.)

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"Oh," he concluded, "and send me some music."

"Um...we do have a few staff members who can hambone."

"No, I mean recordings. I know you have them."

"We do, only they're..." The woman at the front desk tactfully avoided saying "off-limits." "The City of Tomorrow exhibit includes a player in mint condition."

"Yep," Jacob said. He buzzed out.

He turned and faced Pip, wanting to fire off a "what are you looking at."

Instead, he spontaneously dropped to the floor and gave her twenty.

Vigorous push-ups! He had to gauge his energy somehow. Two! Three! If he could manage twenty, that'd be decent. Four! Five! Of course, his ideal would be—

"Prince!" Pip dropped her book and ran to him.

He ignored it, knew she feared that he was killing himself. But the tremors hadn't started yet.

Only truckloads of sweat. And a bit of a sting. Thirteen, fourteen.

Fifteen...

His arms locked up while they were still bent. So did his jaws.

Prelude to tremors.

Pip threw her arms around him and yanked him upright. He wanted to shove her away, clearly couldn't.

"Let me test my limits!" he cried. "The same way we tested yours. It's worked so far!"

The maid propped him against the wall. Lowering her voice, she said, "If you ask me, I don't think the secret to our success has been over-analyzing and exhausting every option. I think it's been bullshitting."

"No," Jacob said between puffs of air. "Cleverness and bullshitting."

Pip brightened. "Sure!"

"And cleverness starts with analysis. You need to know the rules before you bend them."

Pip solemnly shook her head.

He tried to put it in words she might appreciate. "You need vocabulary before you can make puns?"

"But too much analysis just leaves you with a dictionary in your head. I pop those open sometimes, when I'm alone in the castle and I'm horribly bored...and you know how many words in there are completely useless, unless you're a doctor or a scientist? And most of them aren't even funny words."

Jacob watched her steadily. Was he supposed to laugh?

Pip didn't seem to be in a laughing mood either. She was trying, but she couldn't quite make it. Her eyes went up the wall and onto the ceiling. She sighed.

Finally Jacob realized that she pitied him. God...that was almost too much to bear. Magical-spiritual-systemic disability? That might have been just fine, on its own...

"Jacob," she said, eyes falling back on him, "I dunno what'll cheer you up, but I'm trying, okay?"

"I'll be pretty cheerful once you give me back my system," he said.

"But...but people need hope, and stuff."

"I'm not sure what you're getting at."

"I mean that..."

Pip sat frozen. Words were lodged in her throat, her chest, somewhere.

She rattled it off in a single, dead-eyed breath: "I mean I don't know how to give you back your system."

Seconds of silence.

"...Are you saying that you want to die, Pip? Right here and right now?"

"No!" she blurted. Her hands flew out in a frantic "stop" gesture. "I want to be a little microscopical bit clearer. The reason I'm on this ship, the thing I'm on this ship to do...is the same thing that'll give you your system back."

Jacob studied her, trying to keep his breathing level. Pip was doing the exact same.

"Who?"

"I can't tell you, or else our whole thing is over. Because you'll have no reason to...keep...me."

He let out a slow breath. Brazen, but not any more brazen than she'd been before.

"And proof that you're not lying?"

"There is none."

Again, he expected nothing less.

He told himself, This alliance is as provisional as it's ever been. Didn't put him at ease at all.

"You told me this because..."

Pip shook a fist. "Because you deserve truth! O-or something like it!"

"You know what Prof. Federline was talking about."

"Yes," she said. "But again, if I shared it, all this would be over." She crossed her arms, reluctantly. "You're a prince, man. I tried to kill you. Once you have your powers, it's open season."

She took a deep, whistling breath. "Just let me find and talk to this person. Okay? Please?"

"Find them how?"

"The same way we've been doing. Go around the ship and see who we can see."

Short films played out in Jacob's mind: all the worst and most bumbling greetings that Pip had given the other guests since boarding.

So...more of that?

"I guess it's easier than killing my brother."

"Your brother!" Pip suddenly shouted. "What're you gonna do about that? Iron!?" Now she was holding her Iron.

"Uh...put that away. And no. He's not, actually, waiting behind the front door, so it seems like a lost cause. If we happen to come across him, though..."

Pip drew a line across her throat. Jacob shook his head. Pip, after a pause, mock-stabbed her own heart repeatedly. Jacob nodded wisely.

The aetham light on the wall glowed to life. Ding-dong.

The clean-up crew was here, along with soothing music guaranteed not to help at all.

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