The Sacrifice Game

(65)

Or maybe I was just imagining it. “Who’s running things in there?” I asked. “Come on. Take over. I know you’re tougher than that.”

2 Jeweled Skull was gasping, something scraping deep down in his chest, like a stick over rough stone.

“Come on, something’s happening, right? Something struggling to get out. Come on, come on.”

I thought another worm was coming out of his nose and grabbed it, but it fell apart, it was just a lymph bubble. A big bead of blood swelled up under his eye and popped into a drip, and another was forming on the caruncle of his other eye, and one in each nostril and a big bubble of mucusy blood inflated in his mouth. I turned and grabbed the teaser by his thinning pigtail. What’s going on? I asked. He gave a humiliative no-excuses-sir gesture, the closest thing he could do to a shrug, and pressed his chest down onto the floor. You incompetent sicko moron, I thought, 2JS’s going to die, he’s dying without telling us anything, and there’s just nothing else for it.

2JS’s face was freezing into this blank truculence.

2JS out on the mat. I held his head in my hands and opened his mouth.

Okay, okay, I thought. No absolute despair. The only thing to do is get yourself into that box of jelly with all the bugs and drugs and all the available information, hope that Marena and the Chocula gang can dig me out with some degree of me still left in my skull, and try to figure it out on that end.

Except you won’t be able to do it, will you? Koh really didn’t tell you anything. You know a little, but not enough.

Maybe with the J Machine working full-time, I thought.

Right.

It might take decades of computer searches to come up with the key. Even if you could really do it that way. Which I doubted. It was like everything was still encrypted through an array of NSA proprietary algorithms. At that point ciphers really do become unbreakable. Anyway, I knew enough to know that whatever Koh had been doing with that move, it wasn’t something you could figure out. It was a secret rule, not a strategy. It was like you were playing chess with someone who didn’t know that a pawn can turn into a queen on the back rank. Somehow she’d turned that runner into the equivalent of a queen, and it was according to some scheme nobody seemed to know.

If only, if only, if only this stuff were some simple secret, like, sure, there’s such and such an asteroid at such and such a place and if you don’t blast it it’s going to getcha. But it just wasn’t simple, Blanche, it was this whole field of study, a whole branch of chaos and probability theory and all this other stuff that I wasn’t even enough of a mathematician to identify.

Koh really should have let me in on that one. Should’ve trusted me instead of that Porcuputz fucker. Oh, well. Or maybe she thought that even if she told me everything she knew I wouldn’t be able to utilize it anyway. You never knew with that girl.

I liked her anyway, though A click. A little rattle. There was still breath in there. I raised one of his eyelids with my thumb. The pupil contracted.

It focused. He saw me.

IS HE STILL THINKING INSIDE?

“Everybody leave,” I said.

Hun Xoc scuttled everyone out. 2 Jeweled Skull and I were alone.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here, last call, last move.”

I moved my eye over him to where he could focus on it. His expression was weird but I thought he was conscious and that I had his attention. I put my one hand on the back of his head and stroked his forehead with the other.

Come on, friend, I said in Chol. Friends. Right?

There was a hint of a sound in his throat like someone cutting a tiny hole with a keyhole saw.

I’m sorry it got this way, I said. I mean, I’m sorry too. I won’t tell anyone I learned from you. I’ll say spies told me…

He seemed to be tuning out. I shifted into humilific court language.

“My father, you have me in you, and I

Apologize for giving pain; I know

We’re both the same on different sides; I’m honored…”

I was losing him.

“Come on,” I said in English again. “Look in what you know from me. When you die you don’t just end, you never even happened. This planet’s a dust ball with a few suicidal cannibal viruses on it, and you’ll just, that’s it.” This is bullshit, I thought. We’re not getting anywhere.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I’ll take you back. I’ll dump your brain into the guck and have it in the casket and we’ll scan it into some poor shmuck in my k’atun.”

Nothing.

“Come on, look in my consciousness,” I said. My heart was whamming against my ribs. “You know I can do it. I’m offering you a chance. Come on. Just look in me and see what you can get, I’ll give you a monument and honors in the overtime, a whole new dynasty-”

“YOU WON’T,” he said. His vocal cords weren’t working and his tongue was sewn down onto the inside of his lower lip so he couldn’t swallow it. His breath was like swamp gas. I recoiled but got it back together.

“I might,” I said. “That’s all you have. Play balls.”

He was staring at me. My skin tingled.

“Come on. It’s the closest thing to immortality you’ll ever have. You might as well start from scratch at this point. Right? And your name will still mean something. Or just do it because it’s the right thing to do. Even you can see that. Or just do it for fun, you know, sacal chakan can kin bin yx bolon. Just do it for the hell of it.”

No response.

“You know,” I said, “death, we all do it, right? In fact I probably won’t even live as long as you have. Just do it for me. We had a lot of fun, right? You did great here. You’re the greatest. Come on. It means you’ll stay in the game, right? No game, no fame, right? More game. Come on. Please, please, pretty please, ugly please with sugar and the blood of four hundred immortal kings on top, pleasy pleasyweazy pluz plaz pleez.”

2 Jeweled Skull looked into my eyes for nine beats and I thought he almost smiled, and then I realized he was repeating something, over and over:

“A wing-tip harpy feather,” he choked, “a wing-tip harpy feather, a wing-tip harpy feather…”