This juice was strong, and tonight he needed something thicker than the wine he had been drinking like water over the past few days. Happily, Marv, the former owner of the Wingman, had reopened his bar on the trading-post rig and was back to making his potent drink.
Miles looked up, tail thumping, as X sneaked another swig.
“Not for you, buddy,” he murmured.
Ton and Victor stopped at a door that led to an interior stairwell. The dog entered, and X followed, taking another nip as he prepared to do something he had dreaded for days.
Nearing the bottom, he put the flask away, not wanting Lieutenant Sloan to see he had moved up to the hard stuff. She waited with a torch at the bottom landing.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“Getting better with each step,” X replied.
“That’s good, sir.”
She waved the torch down the enclosed concrete stairwell. Miles kept beside X, looking up every time he winced from the pain.
Two more levels of stairs ended at a passage of hatches. The Cazadores had used this area as storage in the past, and now his people had retrofitted one level into a morgue.
A wall of cool air hit them as they entered the room.
Candles in sconces lit up mounds of rusted metal parts that had been moved and stacked along the sides of the room.
The glow from her torch chased away the shadows, capturing a group of four men already huddled around a metal table in the center of the room. A sheet covered the corpse of General Nick “Rhino” Baker.
X stopped to take a drink from his flask without Sloan seeing him. Then he limped after her until he reached the table.
Two more militia soldiers followed them inside—for security purposes, X supposed. Mac, Felipe, and two Cazador men X didn’t recognize all turned toward him and bowed slightly.
“Good evening, King Xavier,” said Mac.
“No, it isn’t,” X said.
Sloan raised her torch, and X saw Rhino for the first time since the Purple Pearl. The massive warrior looked better now than he had then.
X thanked the Octopus Lords, or whoever was listening, for the two drums of embalming fluid scavenged on a recent foraging trip to the mainland. Someone had done a good job cleaning Rhino up, dressing him in his battle armor with the crest of the Barracudas.
X reached out and shook Mac’s hand.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done,” X said. “You risked your life to help Rhino protect me at the Purple Pearl, and again on Renegade.”
“General Rhino thought very highly of you, sir. He believed you are the one chosen to protect this place, and if he was willing to die for you, then so am I.” Mac pounded his chest armor with his prosthetic hand.
X looked back to Rhino and resisted the urge to take another drink.
“So what happens now?” he asked.
“Tradition is to send a warrior out in a boat and give him to the Octopus Lords, but Rhino apparently had other plans,” Mac said. “He wanted an old-world ceremony.”
“He wants us to bury him?” X asked.
“Not exactly.” Mac looked toward the torch Sloan held.
“He wanted to be cremated?” X asked.
“Yes, and have his ashes spread over the islands, and some of them given to Sofia, his one true love.”
“Then we will make that happen,” X said. “Lieutenant, find a boat that we can put his body on. Use whatever spare wood we have.”
She hesitated, probably because they didn’t have much wood to spare, but then she gave a nod.
“I’m surprised Sofia isn’t here now,” X said.
“Tradition is not to have the wife or lover see the deceased until the ceremony,” Mac said. “Rhino would not have wanted her to see him like this, either.”
X put a hand on the general’s arms, which were crossed over his chest.
One of the other Cazadores standing behind Felipe and Mac held out a spear shaft. The motion caught the attention of the militia soldiers standing guard, but X waved them back when he saw that it was Rhino’s double-bladed spear.
X took the shaft and carefully placed it over Rhino’s body.
“I never served with a braver warrior,” X said. “I grew to trust him like a Hell Diver.”
They stared at his body for a moment in silence.
“I knew Rhino for many years,” Mac said. “In those years I’ve never known him to kill anyone to advance in rank. He earned his rank by completing missions and killing beasts in the wastes.”
X pulled out his flask and drank, drawing the gaze of Sloan’s lazy eye. He handed it to Mac, and Mac took a gulp.
“Yeow!” Mac said, making a bitter face.
“Good stuff, right?” X said with a chuckle.
Mac handed the flask back, but X put it in his pocket. It was time to switch to wine.
But first he had a favor to ask.
“How many men do you have, Mac?” X asked.
“I recruited thirty after Rhino was killed,” he said. “But the battle with the praetorian guards cut our numbers in half.”
“Keep recruiting. We’re going to need a lot more loyal Cazadores for what comes next.”
“What does come next, King Xavier?”
X wasn’t exactly sure how to answer that. In the past, gut decisions had guided him and kept him alive on dives, on his trek through the wastes, on the journey to the Metal Islands, and in the battles that followed. Now his gut was telling him those were the easy fights.
What came next would be for the future of humanity.
X patted Rhino again, holding a breath to keep from choking up. Then he nodded at Mac and the other Cazadores and turned away from the table to leave with Sloan.
It was time to forget his worries for now with a bottle of wine, or three.
X jerked free from the nightmare. He sat up to glaring sunlight and a mean headache. The first thing he saw was his bandaged stump.
Not what you’d call an inspiring start to the morning.
Not morning, he realized when he saw the clock. It was just after noon.
He groaned and slung his legs over the side of his bed. Miles hopped up, tail wagging, keen to get outside. The poor dog had been cooped up all morning.
“I’m sorry, boy, just hold on,” X said.
Without this dog, X wouldn’t have survived this recent flirtation with death—or his ten years in the wastes, for that matter.
A knock came on the door, and X stumbled over, nearly tripping over a pile of dirty clothes. He went to grab the knob with a right hand that wasn’t there.
He hoped it was Ted with a fresh supply of shine.
“Ah, shit,” X grumbled.
Lieutenant Sloan stood outside, in a freshly pressed black militia uniform.
“Nice to see you, too, sir…” Her lazy eye flitted from his bare feet up to his shorts and ragged T-shirt. “Sir, you haven’t even dressed.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled. He walked back into his room, bumping an empty bottle that skidded across the floor.
“Were you drinking this morning?” Sloan said. She followed him into the room.
“I had some wine for breakfast, if you count three in the morning as breakfast. Grapes are fruit, right?”
He didn’t need to look to know she had found the other empty wine bottles that Ted had sneaked him the past two nights.
“What can I say,” he said with a shrug. “Cazador wine is great for numbing pain.”
He wasn’t speaking of his injuries. He spent his bedridden days thinking about Rhino, Katrina, Aaron, and all the other dead people he had loved.
At night, he dreamed of them—and of Ada.
The guilt was eating him alive, and as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he was having a hard time functioning since they cut his arm off.