Scions of Sacrifice Read online

  Scions of Sacrifice

  Book Four of The Scion Chronicles

  Eric Kent Edstrom

  To J

  Contents

  1. The Dreamless

  2. Paid for in Chips

  3. Par Excellence

  4. It’s Called the Flip

  5. Your Bumbling Pursuit

  6. Drinking from a Fire Hose

  7. It Means I’m Alive

  8. The Blood Moves

  9. My Double Lucky Number

  10. How Insignificant She Is

  11. Plag

  12. Isn’t That What’s-Her-Name?

  13. Stem to Stern

  14. A Thought Experiment

  15. A Thought Form

  16. Youth is Beauty

  17. An Incarnation of the Goddess

  18. I Don’t Like the World

  19. Two was Good

  20. No. You are an AI

  21. Lazarus Watches

  22. Do. Not. Move. The. Van

  23. That Image of his Face

  24. A Rogue Tear

  25. No Mind at All

  26. A Zigzag Protocol

  27. Pressure Bleeds

  28. A Strategy

  29. Wet Paint Sticky

  30. Look at the Evidence

  31. Just Like Dr. Carlhagen

  32. Jewelry Maybe

  33. A Rat is a Boy

  34. Rectangular and Fairly Small

  35. A Disinterested Scythe

  36. Like a Pale Oval

  37. Such a Creature

  38. An Audible Fog

  39. The Jagged Rending

  40. Something Closer to Nausea

  41. Began to Morph

  42. From the Verge

  43. Am I to Your Liking

  44. Wise of You to Primp

  45. Surrounded by Liars

  46. Cowardly Cat

  47. Like the Axis of a Globe

  48. Vortex of Data

  49. The Price of my Forgiveness

  50. Out Nothing

  51. Your Time is Up

  52. Jump Right off a Cliff

  53. Great Jaws

  54. Scion Vitality

  55. Coffin-Like

  56. Began to Clang

  57. Clawing for Handholds

  58. Regrettably, Some

  59. The Vertebrae Pop and Crack

  60. Policy Change

  61. To See Fury

  62. A Panicked Cackle

  63. The Motherlode

  64. Atone for Killing

  65. Back Into Oblivion

  66. Enough Stickiness

  67. The Jugular Vein

  68. Take Me

  69. Rage-Fire

  70. Into Our World

  71. Balanced on the Moment

  72. Home For Her Soul Mate

  73. Their Parched Skin

  74. A Perfect Fit

  75. Nightrise

  Thief of Sparks: No Witnesses

  Thief of Sparks: Mercus Vision

  Thief of Sparks: He’s Starving

  Untitled

  Also by Eric Kent Edstrom

  1

  The Dreamless

  The Dreamless is cold, timeless, empty.

  No fear. No love. No desire.

  Awareness is not aware.

  Livy is not Livy here.

  Her lungs are still. No need for breath.

  The blood moves. Thump.

  Thump.

  One heartbeat per minute. Growth continues while the brain idles.

  Microscopic barbs jut from each of 156 needles piercing her legs, scalp, stomach, arms, throat, feet, fingers. Thousands of fibers twine through her tissue, suffusing her with sensors, nano-injectors, and exo-capillaries.

  Thump.

  Lazarus is satisfied. The subject is healthy. Perfect growth hibernation. Cryopod operational status is nominal.

  The Dreamless is

  Cold.

  Thump.

  Timeless.

  Empty.

  2

  Paid for in Chips

  Current fashion in Casino San Juan was very short skirts exposing tat-painted legs, low necklines, and half-veils. It was that last item that made the casino city such a useful hideout for Jacey and her companions.

  The lacy, semi-transparent veils covered the nose and mouth, leaving the eyes exposed. Jacey liked this because she could see without being recognized. The fashion was due—Meow Meow said—to pervasive camera surveillance. People in the casino city valued anonymity, and the Republic of Puerto Rico—reliant on the cash shed by the gambling tourist trade—tolerated veils, which were illegal everywhere else in North America.

  Unfortunately, the fabric was too gauzy to filter the rancid mixture of cigar smoke, the stink of frying chicken, and the liters of cologne and perfume the casino guests used to mask the stench of their sweat.

  Jacey waved to a cocktail waiter, a shirtless man with sculpted muscles. He wore only a loincloth. “Water, please.” He smirked and walked off.

  The smells hung in a thick haze over the gambling hall occupying the ground floor of The Ratz, a dilapidated hotel several blocks from the heart of the city. But Dante had favored this dump of a place for the very reasons it disgusted Jacey. The clientele were always drunk, and the proprietors didn’t ask questions.

  The smells assaulted Jacey’s nose and the back of her throat. She struggled not to cough, which was seen as bad manners. According to Dante, the veils had come into fashion during the early days of the plague.

  A slurring woman of about eighty years, with yellow lipstick and false eyelashes two centimeters long, had overheard Dante’s explanation and tugged Jacey aside. “Don’t listen to him. Veils are for modesty.” When Jacey asked why she wasn’t wearing one, the woman had cackled. “I ain’t modest, sweetheart. My motto is if you’ve got it, flaunt it.”

  Jacey found the modesty theory rather dubious, for it seemed that the veiled ladies wore the scantiest clothing. She sure wished her dress covered more skin. Meow Meow had selected everything, of course. The dress was a sleeveless tube of stretchy black material that stopped mid-thigh. The Scion shoes Jacey loved had been tossed in the closet. Now her feet were clamped in ridiculous torture devices made of leather straps and a heel that forced her onto tippy-toes. Meow Meow said they elongated Jacey’s calves.

  Dante had eyed the whole getup with that lascivious smile of his. So far, he’d kept his mouth shut about it. Mostly.

  Letting Meow Meow pick out Jacey’s clothes had been a mistake. But when you’re newly arrived in a foreign land and wearing the most famous face in the world—that of the actress and philanthropist Jacqueline Buchanan—you can’t go shopping without attracting undue notice.

  And notice was what Jacey needed to avoid at all costs. They had eluded Captain Wilcox, so far. But Dr. Carlhagen’s mercenary thug had enormous resources at his disposal.

  A serving girl wearing little more than two bands of gold lamé across her chest and nether regions handed Jacey a drink she hadn’t ordered. “I told the naked guy I wanted water,” Jacey said.

  “Honey, at The Ratz, this is water.” It was more of the silver liquor called KT that was so popular in the casino city.

  Jacey sipped and sighed.

  It was good, sweet and spicy—but more than a few swallows and she’d be lying under the craps table. And what an odd table it was. Covered with green felt, it stretched before her with all of its incomprehensible markings and lines and boxes drawn in white. People crowded around it, throwing down cash and rolling dice. It seemed pointless, but they all loved it.

  Jacey didn’t know the first thing about gambling, which in Casino San Juan was the same as not knowing anything at all. Dante seemed to know enough for both of t
hem.

  Five men in shiny, ill-fitting suits stood around the table, all vaping and occasionally whispering in the ears of their much younger companions. These thin and sultry-faced women were called “good time amigas,” or “amigo,” in one case. Hired lovers. Jacey found the idea equal parts appalling and fascinating.

  “Come on, sixes!” Dante cried as he shook a leather cup of dice. He made Jacey blow on them for good luck, a superstition that proved to have no effect on the outcome.

  Anxious and impatient, Jacey scanned the area for Wilcox. Around the tables of craps, roulette, and blackjack stood ranks upon ranks of noisy holo displays called slot machines. Jacey had looked everywhere on them and found not a single slot. Dante said the name was a leftover from an age when people fed coins into them.

  Now they simply placed a thumb on a sensor and computer accounts transferred monetary credits to the machine. People stared at the displays all day long, watching colorful fruits or characters tumble into rows. Their credit accounts went up and down—usually down, from what Jacey had seen—until they lost it all or had to go to the bathroom.

  With so many beeps and jingles and little tunes playing, the air had a frantic atmosphere. It seemed to say “hurry, hurry, hurry! It’s time to play, play, play, play.” Jacey wanted to cover her ears and run for an area of cleaner air, but Dante said he needed her there.

  What purpose she served—beyond blowing on his dice—she had no idea. She would much rather be with Meow Meow up in the hotel room. More than that, she wanted to get out of there and find a holodesk and finally make contact with Humphrey.

  Dante’s dice came up “snake eyes.” He put his face in his hands and pretended to weep. The vaping throng laughed and commiserated with him, but he was quickly shouldered aside so another man could have a go.

  “Explain to me why we are wasting our time here?” Jacey asked as he led her by the hand through an aisle of slot machines.

  He sidled up to the bar where the immodest old lady was sitting. The bartender, a woman in a bow tie and see-through shirt, shook a silver container and poured clear alcohol into two crystal glasses. Dante flipped a blue chip to her. She caught it in her teeth with the flair of an entertainer, poured Dante a tall drink, and lit it on fire.

  Once the concoction had burned itself out, Dante took a long gulp. Smacking his lips in satisfaction, he leaned toward Jacey, mouth hovering near her temple. “You’re with me because a man alone in this place would be hounded by amigas. And I don’t want to be hounded just now.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Money.”

  “I thought you were rich.”

  “Yes. But if I draw so much as a penny out of my accounts, I’ll be traced here. I don’t think you want Dr. Carlhagen to know where I am, do you?”

  She didn’t.

  While taking a hummingbird sip out of her glass of KT, she scanned the room. “So your plan was to win money?”

  “I’m usually quite lucky,” he said, no hint of irony in his voice.

  “How many chips do we need to get out of Puerto Rico?”

  Dante wore a black jacket and trousers, and a button-down white shirt that had silvery thread woven through it. He’d left the top two buttons undone so that the collar gaped, exposing the dip between his clavicles. His dark hair, still short from the official Scion haircut Dr. Carlhagen required, glistened from the addition of something he simply referred to as “product.”

  The corner of his mouth twitched as he calculated an answer to Jacey’s simple question. “Five of those green and gold ones would do. In a pinch.”

  “Wait here.” She set her drink on the bar.

  Her target was a drunk gambler hunched over a drink at the end of the bar. He looked like most of the men there: paunchy, balding, and red-faced. His rumpled suit spoke of a long day, a rough evening, and a painful night of debauchery. His pudgy hands toyed with a crystal tumbler of KT. The bottle, half-empty, rested next to it.

  Jacey sat on the stool next to him, back to the bar. She crossed her legs, taking care to tug down the skirt of her ridiculous dress.

  The man’s heavy-jowled face swung toward her, red and puffy eyes looking at her bare legs (she had cancelled the tat-painting appointment Meow Meow had scheduled for her, despite the girl’s promises it wasn’t permanent). The man slowly scanned to her chest. His gaze lingered there for a while, then rose to squint at her veil.

  “Damn, girl.”

  Jacey had heard the expression a half a dozen times already tonight. Usually it came from men whose gaze locked onto her chest or backside. Each time, Dante had put a protective—or perhaps possessive—hand on her waist and guided her away.

  Eventually he’d explained to her that it was a positive comment on her looks and not an insult.

  Jacey wasn’t so sure about that. They might be expressing some kind of lusty desire, but it felt icky. She tried to imagine how it would feel if Humphrey said that to her. Well, that might not be so bad. In the right circumstances.

  But none of these people were Humphrey.

  She’d quickly come to understand that Casino San Juan was, essentially, a society based on the Greek philosophy of hedonism, the belief that pleasure-seeking was the purpose of life. The fact that overindulgence in pleasure left so many of them miserable appeared to be lost on everyone. Even worse, it made them vulnerable.

  At the moment, she felt the casino city owed her some recompense for the nasty treatment its men—and a few women—had dealt her. The “damn, girl” comment was what she’d expected, and now this man was going to pay.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked. He’d swiveled on his bar stool to face her.

  “Mary. What’s yours?”

  “Cruze.”

  “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Maria. Very similar to yours, eh?” He jerked his head vaguely away from the bar. “You want to get out of here?”

  “I have a room upstairs.”

  His eyes widened a bit and he slid off the stool. “Let’s go.”

  Jacey gave Dante a flat look as she led the man past him. He understood.

  The elevator ride was tricky. The man got grabby. But he was drunk enough to be off-balance. Jacey managed to trip him. By the time he got to his feet, the elevator doors were opening. She walked out and moved quickly down the hall.

  Cruze staggered after.

  She thumbed the ID scanner for the dingy suite Meow Meow had rented. The door clicked and swung open. Jacey grabbed the man’s collar and pulled him through. Meow Meow was sitting on a sofa, drinking tea, legs curled under her. She was watching something on the video monitor.

  “Look what the kitten dragged in,” she said, in her naughtiest purr.

  This scheme of Jacey’s had been Meow Meow’s idea. Jacey had flatly refused initially. But that was before she’d discovered Dante’s plan was to win money gambling. He’d sounded so confident that they’d go down to the casino, collect some cash, and then leave the hotel.

  “Cruze, this is Meow Meow,” Jacey said.

  “Hey. I know you,” he said, pointing and blinking hard, as if trying to clear smudges from his corneas.

  Dante came in. His jacket was already off. He slung it over the back of a chair and started rolling up the sleeves of his shimmery shirt.

  “What the hell?” Cruze grimaced at Dante. “I’m into the group thing, but not with another dude.”

  “Take him into the bedroom,” Jacey told Meow Meow.

  The girl uncurled from her little nest on the sofa and slinked to their drunken victim. She was wearing silk pajamas that were so much like a Scion uniform that Jacey wished she had them on. Not that Meow Meow’s would have fit her. The girl was a hand shorter and 12 kilos lighter.

  In this light, the pop celebrity looked almost ill. Gaunt cheeks, skeletal wrists. She’d taken off her blue wig. Her natural hair, a bob of brown, was parted neatly down the middle, front locks drawn back and tucked behind her ears.

  �
�How old are you?” Cruze asked Meow Meow. “I think you are too young.”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  Jacey’s job was done. She was tempted to go into the hall, or maybe lock herself in the bathroom. But she’d made this choice, the same way she had when she’d recently threatened a man with torture to get his cooperation.

  That had been Mr. Justin’s brother Orson. She’d needed him to pilot the ship Aphrodite to take the Scions off St. Vitus. She shivered to remember how she’d held up a scalpel and let him believe she would cut him while he’d been helpless, strapped to a cot in the medical ward at the Scion School.

  The threat had produced the desired results. The man had blubbered and begged.

  Expediency was the word she’d thought of then. This was the same thing. They needed money to get off Puerto Rico. This man had lots of it. She’d seen him take a fistful of the green and gold chips, plus a few solid gold ones, from a roulette table while Dante was busy not winning anything.