Chapter 45

  Eric and Kate

  Kate groaned and stirred in her dark corner of the cargo hold.

  “Awake again? ‘bout time.” Eric shined his flashlight at the colorful pile of Kaitlyn Carter. It shuddered in response.

  Kate sat upright with a sudden jolt and slammed her head into the crate stacked above her. She rolled on the deck, clutching her head with a mewl of impotent wrath.

  “Woah, slow down,” said Eric. He returned the beam of light to the cards laid out in front of him. “Your brain’s gonna have enough shit to deal with already.”

  She growled at him, reminding him of Leah.

  Eric played a slow game of cards with himself while consulting a book of Ardian card games he’d picked up at the harbor. He was trying to learn Fool’s Way, the one that the Xeon members had been playing. He had never thought that card games might involve improvised but carefully structured poetry. The rules concerning said poetry remained unclear to him, and the book was not as helpful as he could have hope. He was concluding that he just had to play the game with people who already knew how if he wanted to really figure it out. He tried laying down a hand and read a sample line in the book. “Three birds soared beneath the waves…the fuck?” He didn’t know why this hand had to be “three” something.

  Kate, meanwhile, lay still on the cool wooden surface, grateful for the darkness. She felt as though her skull, having exploded, was coming back together piece by piece. Her brain had been replaced with smoldering cotton, and her thoughts were shoveling through half-melted marshmallows.

  At length, she gathered up the willpower to speak. “W-wa-water,” she croaked.

  “Oh shit, my bad.” Eric scooted over with a water bottle and handed it to her. She gulped half of it down in one go, relishing the sensation.

  “Glasses,” she said. Eric placed them in her hand like putting bait in a spring-loaded bear trap. Moving only her hand, Kate opened them and slowly lowered them onto her face.

  “W-what happened?” she asked. She felt that she was really on a roll with this two-words-at-once maneuver.

  “To you?”

  She nodded, and at once regretted it.

  “Kate, you were high as a kite.”

  She blinked in an effort to process this. Yes, she vaguely remembered something like that.

  “W-w-where?”

  “Where are we?”

  (she didn’t nod)

  “We’re on a supply barge to Orpheus. You, uh, said you wanted to come with me to check on Heidi. Then you passed the fuck out. Couldn’t wake you up for shit. Even took you to a doctor.”

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  “T-took me t-t-to a d-doctor?”

  “Yeah, she said you’re fine. Well, not fine. She said you’d probably, uh, ‘long for the embrace of the cold abyss’ when you woke up.”

  Kate groaned again. “S-sounds about r-r-ri-ri-r–sounds y-yeah.” She gradually turned her head on the dark wooden planks of the cargo hold. A window behind Eric opened into starry darkness. “Are w-we in s-sp-space?”

  Eric nodded. “Yeah. You missed the space dolphins, though.” He glanced out the window and shrugged. “Bummer.”

  Kate’s bloodshot eyes widened. “S-sp-p-s-SPACE DOLPHINS?!” She struggled to her feet.

  “Oh yeah. You know. All…uh, spacey-looking.”

  Kate fumbled a hand in her bag, rummaging through assorted instruments, fighting the pain, a look of grim determination on her face.

  Eric decided he should take it easy on her. After all, he’d never been drunk, or drugged, or whatever the hell Kate was. “Okay, that was a joke, sorry. No space dolphins.”

  Kate’s frantic motion slowed as she comprehended his words. She glared at him with a magnifying glass clutched in her hand. She raised it to her eye and looked at him through it. “N-no s-sp-space dolphins. B-b-but look! It’s a w-wild s-sarc-castic asshole! Jerkus obnoxii.”

  Eric turned his laugh into a cough, not sure whether it would piss her off.

  Kate returned to her attempt to hold her head together with her hands. “Is th-this how Aunt B-be-b-bec–how it feels f-for her? W-what the hell!”

  Frisby and Navi appeared, flitting together down from the upper decks where Eric had sent them to scout.

  “N-navi!” shouted Kate, a little too loudly. Her own voice rang in her ears painfully.

  “Here,” said Eric. “Doc said to take this when you woke up.” He handed her a small yellow flower, outlined in a weird green light. It smelled both medicinal and sugary.

  “A f-f-flower? F-for ME?” Kate swooned.

  “Just eat it.”

  She popped it into her mouth and began chewing without hesitation. She held out a hand and Navi danced down into her palm. “And you!” she said, reaching for Frisby. The dragon happily crawled up into her embrace. “You were s-st-stuffed the l-last t-time I saw you!”

  “Last time you remember,” Eric murmured. “Here, I also got these. Bootleg skittles or something. Probably turn your skin all different colors or some shit.” He handed a brown paper bag over to Kate.

  She took it and began eating them–again, without hesitation. Frisby crawled over to the bag and nosed around inside it.

  Kate departed briefly to find a restroom, and on her return slowly overcame her hangover eating bootleg skittles and playing with the angels while Eric learned a solo card game.

  Later, Kate would join him and they would play a few more games while digging into the supplies Eric had purchased at the Skywater docks.

  Later, Eric would show her the picture he’d received from the Theians. It was of Kate when the Theians first met her: muddy, bedraggled, glasses askew, “like the bassist from the black lagoon,” according to Eric. He would not surrender that picture, no matter how she threw things at him. He decided to save the video of her wrestling match with Hazel for later.

  Later, they would wander above onto the main deck of the barge, where they would see the ominous mass of the Metal Moon closing in around them like the rotting fangs of a cosmic beast.