I acquire an executive assistant. And a drug dealer: Chapter 11.
In which Deimos meets a face from his past, who might come in handy.
Previously, on Jupiter Ruins Everything: Deimos Zaragoza has returned home to Ganymede to put a complex bloody revenge plot into motion, and in spite of many expensive surgeries to make himself impossible to recognize—he was recognized. By a sabertooth cat that imprinted on him as a kitten.
The last chapter is right here. Remember that you can always consult the Cast of Characters or The Lore document if you need a refresher, or start the story at Chapter One!
Chapter Eleven: I acquire an executive assistant. And a drug dealer.
“Hey, girl,” I said, to the grizzled old saber-tooth cat nuzzling me.
“It is you, isn’t it?” said the young man on the other end of the cat’s leash. The one I was trying very hard not to look in the eye. The one who somehow, in spite of a massive conspiracy by brutal time and expensive surgery to render me fully unrecognizable, had recognized me. The one who I might have to murder. “Vanth? Vanth Ganymede? You look so different - but - she hates everyone - literally everyone - but she loved you...”
“Hi, Umbriel,” I said, looking up at him at last.
Umbriel El-Jadida. Younger than me and Klotho, a sweet scrapper kid from a household everyone knew was abusive. Idolized Klotho, who gave him Gayatri when mom found her in a litter abandoned in the collective’s scrapspace (we couldn’t keep her because mom was allergic). Still skinny, still hungry looking, covered now in cheap little tattoos that told the story of a harried, hard life.
On his neck, older and more blurred than the rest, a bird pierced by three arrows. Why did I feel certain it was celebrating Klotho?
“Vanth,” he said, and rushed to swamp me in a bear hug so fierce and tight I couldn’t be mad at it. “Fuck, brother, it’s so fucking good to see you - but you’re incognito, yeah? Let’s go somewhere we can speak freely.”
Without discussing it, we fell into step on the crooked alley that led to the massive rotting hulk of the cyanobattery.
Out-siders were used to the stink. Folks from the far side of the Wall found it revolting. So, then as now, it was the place to go talk freely.
“I was so, so sad to hear about what happened to Klotho,” he said, scratching at his neck. “I mean, not that we know what happened, but - you know. Did you ever find anything more than the official report?”
“Killed in action on a top-secret mission,“ I said. “Could have been anything.”
“But like, they were a data guy. And spooky good. You could do that from anywhere. And they typically protect those assets well. Why would he have been sent on a mission?”
“I’m going to find out,” I said. “It’s on my list. I have a very long list.”
Kids watched us go, but kept their distance when they saw Gayatri.
I said, “your folks...”
“Mom’s still around. Dad - well, let’s just say he put his hands on me until Gayatri was big enough to make him stop. And she made him stop forever.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. He was an asshole, but when they’re our family we often can’t help loving assholes.”
“He was a garbage person and he got what he deserved,” Umbriel said. “I miss him a lot.”
“Things have changed quite a bit here,” I said, gesturing to the new buildings liberally interspersed among the falling-down tenements. Like exuberant weeds in a dying garden. “Do the same families still own most of the property?”
“You know they do,” Umbriel said. “Couple years ago the city council passed a bill to break them up, calling them monopolies, but they just broke up into shell companies with the same structure and the same ownership. Nothing changes.”
Everything is going to change, I said, but not out loud.
“You’ve clearly done well for yourself,” he said.
“I had good motivation,” I said.
“It’s Thyone, isn’t it?” he asked, as we drew near to the cyanobattery. Blue-green blooms filled the puddles around us; blue-green tentacles climbed trees and rusted-out husks of vehicles. The smell had graduated from musty basement to open sewage. “Please tell me you’ve come here to take her out.”
I smiled. Petted Gayatri. Looked Umbriel up and down.
He was a risk. He’d never intentionally betray me, but I didn’t know him - not now, not really. Who knew what addictions or debts might make him vulnerable.
But also. I couldn’t kill him.
Not that I wasn’t a big fan of murder. Not that I’d hesitant to get my hands filthy if that’s what it took to tear my foes apart presented itself.
But so few people were left in this world, who remembered my sibling. Killing Umbriel would be like killing a piece of Klotho.
Since I couldn’t kill him, I had to trust him.
“It’s a lot of people,” I said. “The less you know the better. But you could be useful to me, if you wanted to help.”
“With my whole fucking heart. Me and Gayatri.”
“Good boy,” I said, and he grinned like the little kid he still was inside.
Unlike you, said one of the voices in my head, you miserable bitter old dead-inside cynic.
Bitter and dead-inside is what we had to become to do what we have to do, said the rest of them.
“I’ll pay you,” I said. “You can be my executive assistant.”
“I’d do it for free.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’m paying you. I don’t need to tell you - this is going to be some serious shit, Umbriel. Dangerous, dirty work.”
He laughed. “Man, sometime I’ll tell you the story of all the dumb dirty dangerous shit I’ve done in the past twenty years. I’ve risked my life for the price of an eye-dropper full of spiderwebbing, so it’ll be a pleasure to do so for something as meaningful as bloody revenge.”
The wind shifted, on schedule. Suddenly all we smelled was clean fresh ozone off the ionized bubble.
“First things first,” I said. “Can you get me a high-quality, dependable supply of mycotic opium?”
“Of course,” he said. “What do you take me for? Street name is greendream these days. Since Jove Central started cracking down.”
“And mycotic hashish?”
“Sure,” he said. “We call that reddream.”
“That one I remember,” I said softly.
There are indeed several genetic sequences from poppies and from the female cannabis sativa plant glommed onto the fungal double helices of these two narcotic substances, and the high that each induces does indeed lend itself to the respective descriptive flights of fancy of which 19th-century authors who smoked and ate opium and hash were so fond.
But. Most importantly. Greendream lets you climb inside a memory, and relive it in all its vivid sensory detail, and stay there for as long as you want.