The Worldshift Chronicles: Monday

Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

I joined the outgoing patrons. We made our way back to the barns. They jockeyed for positions along the fence of the main corral. I sized up egress and ingress points in the pen, studying the crowd for potential distractions. I had hoped to be sleeping in the corner of the arena, rather than jumping around it all willy-nilly, engaged in some ridiculous contest to prove worth.

But coin was coin.

It was a hungry world.

Custer called me over. Viz stood in the center of the arena. He twirled his staff and made faux attack strokes against invisible adversaries. Jack took a seat on a bench, looking pleased with himself, adjusting his respirator.

“And here we are again, milady. Will you be requiring any hand-to-hand weapons?” Custer asked, his voice muffled beneath his rebreather. He motioned to a nearby rack stocked with rusted ordnance. I rolled my eyes at him. “Apologies, but I’m required to ask. I’ll need your armaments then.” I unbuckled the holstered twinkie and slipped off the cross-strapped pistols, handing the gun belts to Custer. He put them in a bag and set them aside.

“Good luck,” he said.

“Luck is for dummies and dice,” I said, grinning at the giant.

“Isn’t that the truth. Easy does it out there.”

“Did you give Viz a similar pep talk?” I teased.

“No pep. Only a warning. I told him he might be about to learn a lesson in humility. He said it was worth the chits.”

“It’s a shame he won’t be collecting them,” I said.

Then I entered the corral. Custer closed the entry gate behind me. The dozen or so spectators clamored and wagered between themselves. I walked out to the center. Viz circled, spinning his staff.  

“You should’ve brought in something to spar with,” he said. “It would have made a better show for the mark.” He looked over at Jack, gazing upon us like a starved rat and we were chunks of cheese.

“If I gotta hand-to-hand, I need my fingers free.”

“You should know he told me if I bested you, I’d get the lake job.”

“Same. I thought you were on a run to Tiwan.”

“I am. In that posh cruiser of his, I can swing north and catch a wagon back here to my rig long before deadline.”

With that, he made his first move, whirling his staff around his head and rotating it backward in a swift arc to catch me off guard. It was a classic gambit. I dodged the strike, ducked under another stroke, then crouched and knocked him over with a standard leg sweep. He went down hard. His eyes widened in surprise. He rose up quick, frazzled, and brought the staff over his head in a downward blow. It caught my shoulder instead of my tilted head. I cried out and lurched away. My left arm went numb.

I circled him and feinted left. Viz countered, bringing the staff around for another stroke. I ran at him, somersaulting over his head, flipping mid-air, and landing on my feet. Then I spun around and struck a resounding blow with my right fist above his eyes.

The crowd applauded my acrobatics. Custer roared. Viz reeled, stunned. He dashed at me in a fit of anger. I dodged one stroke, another, then a third landed on my right thigh. In fact, he was faster than I anticipated. I buckled as my right leg gave out. Coldness seeped into the lower right quarter of my torso. I went down, tried to rise and could not. My leg felt like a limp rope.

I was no rookie with melee combat. What he was doing shouldn’t have been possible. He hadn’t hit any central nerve clusters. I didn’t understand.

Then he rushed me again, holding his staff in front of him. He bowled me over as I grabbed the weapon with my right hand, wrestling it between us as he fell on top of me. In that position, his weight was a deciding element. It was possible I was about to lose the match. My left arm and right leg were inert. He’d somehow managed to slow me down. I was only fighting him off with the remaining bare strength of my right arm and left leg, my left knee raised, keeping his full weight off me. But I wasn’t going to last long.

Our faces were inches apart. His breath smelled of cornbread and ale. “Numbing gel from a Frisco pharmacy,” he whispered to me under the crowd’s catcalls. “Don’t worry. The effect only lasts ten minutes. That’ll be long enough to impress mister moneybags over there.”

I grunted, trying to shove him off of me. My useless limbs felt like stone.

“I could tell them you’re cheating,” I gasped.

“You could,” Viz agreed, applying more force. “But I know you gunfighters, Monday. You got codes. You ain’t gonna snitch.”

It was true. I could’ve ended the bout there and then if I wanted just by piping up. It simply wasn’t how I operated. Couriers needed every trick in the trade to survive. I couldn’t fault Viz for stacking his deck, same as I did in keeping my arcana on the sly.

With two limbs out of operation, as much as it pained me to consider it, if I wanted to win, I’d probably have to pull one of my rabbits out of my hat.

The problem was squeezing the juice without alerting the crowd to my tricksies. I’d never used spell craft in public at any cities or settlements. The only folks who’d seen me practice sorcery were Bard, Maddy, and Cabo, and a handful of unsuspecting assailants in the wild who’d required drastic interventions. Even that, I’d kept at a minimum. Most of those magicks had been correctives against scree pods with numbers greater than my supply of bullets. Screes were inherently terrified of arcana. I’d used minor charms from the earth college to pacify mutated wildlife from time to time. On two or three occasions, I’d mustered telekinetics toward outland marauders, and during each of those incidents, all they’d seen afterward was the dust wake from my hover bug.

The current situation wasn’t hostile. I could toss the match to Viz. He needed the coin more than I did. It was good pay. It wasn’t life changing pay.

But I couldn’t take a dive. I just couldn’t.

Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was the fact he was conning the game himself. Maybe I was a fellow huckster right alongside him, with my preternatural speed, and the possibility it existed because of my hidden cheat sheet. It wasn’t lost on me using the very same shortcut I regularly denounced when it suited me was a double standard.

But one scam was as good as the next.

Viz grunted, nudging my knee aside and throwing his full weight on the staff. I wrapped my left leg around his lower abdomen and flipped him over. He tore the staff from my grasp, scrambled away, rose, twirled it dramatically over his head, and charged again.

A robur spell oughta do it. If I can zap it fast enough to avoid detection.

I stumbled to half height on my left knee, my right leg still useless. My left arm dangled. I stilled my mind. Then he was there, swinging the staff with all his might. I ducked under it, used my left leg to propel upward. I squinted my eyes, trying to cloak my optics as best I could (one effect of using arcana was an involuntary radiance of energy emanated through the eyeballs), then made a fist and focused the morph-spell’s collected energy into it. If manifested proper, the charm would harden my flesh into a scaly, stone-like texture.

My hand took on a dim glow of amber just before it connected with Viz’s chin. He flew backwards several feet from the fueled uppercut, sprawled flat on his back, out cold. I cut focus and my hand immediately transmuted to its original state, the glow fading as quick as it had come on. I hoped the scuffle had been enough distraction and nobody had noticed my hand’s split-second aberration, nor the brief burst of light in my eyes. It’d been a calculated risk, a poor choice upon consideration. 

But again…my pride. I had some. More than a fair share.

Custer and Jack shouted out approval. The crowd offered salutations and paid off wagers to one another. Custer entered the arena and went to Viz, checking his status.

“Alive and defeated! A definitive engagement!” Custer boomed.

He lumbered over to me as I struggled to stand. “Caught me unawares,” I muttered. “I didn’t think we were playing hardball, it’s my fault.”

Feelings in my shoulder and leg were returning, pins and needles. I stood up, off balanced.

“Yet you triumphed,” said Jack, walking up to us.  “An impressive bout. I much enjoyed the vault over his head. Where did you learn such a feat?”

I gazed weary at Jack. “Pay up. Twice what you offered, and the original amount to Viz,” I said, motioning to the unconscious boy. He was carried out of the corral by a couple of willing observers.

“Bring him inside,” Custer bellowed at them. “And have Bard take a look-see.”

Jack studied me. “Added bonuses to the proposed amount wasn’t the agreed upon bid.”

“Then find somebody else to take you to the Lake in the Sky.”

“All right, all right. You’ve won me over. A rare occasion, but it happens. I’ll leave the boy his due chits, and you and I will settle up in the wagon. I will prepare our departure as you wrap up whatever you need to do before we leave.” He walked away, humming a zippy tune.

Custer watched him go. “I don’t like that fella.”

I laughed. “You think?”

“Are you sure you want to get in a car with that guy for forty-eight hours?”

“I’ve hauled worse.”

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