The Dart Slayer Part 1: Smaller

 

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ONE

               She woke up because a hand grabbed her throat and jerked her down, past the bed and the floor and the earth. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Gravel and dust flooded her eyes and nose, zoomed around and through her skin. A thick blanket of cuts from pebbles that wouldn’t let her hands to her neck.
               Back up, and she blasted up through ground again. She needed to cough but couldn’t—her neck was broken, she was sure it was broken.
               She reached for the hand's slimy fingers and snapped one back. The attacker didn’t scream, but it let her go by slamming her forward into a thick stone wall.
               The world spun like she’d been drinking, and she pulled her aching body around and locked her eyes on the monster.
               It was visible, but colorless. Its hands were like a gorilla’s, but it was as big as an elephant—impossibly big. It had to be one of the Deep, but those were supposed to be small, squirrel-sized at most.
               The monster ran toward her again. She pushed herself to move, but she could still barely breathe. She was alone. Why was nobody helping?
               The Deep can talk, she thought.
               “Who are you?” she croaked, loud as she could.
               The monster stopped, and then leapt dozens of feet in the air. It spread its arms and now they were wings.
               Oh, damn, she thought. It can fly now.
               “What do you want?” she shrieked—she didn’t want to sound so panicked, but she had to make the monster hear her. It had to respond to something, right?
               The monster hacked as if about to spit, and sliced its face in a hyena grin.
               “You,” he said. “Die.”
               Ah.
               Well, shit.
               The monster dove.
               She felt her father’s voice pounding at her ears like it always had—“Find a weapon, find a weapon”—but she had no time. If she looked away, the monster would swing and kill her. Her hand was only touching the wall of the—oh.
               She didn’t have time to jump to the side, still injured. She felt wind from the monster’s zoom—and she collapsed. He flew into the building nose-first before swerving away. His flight stuttered like a butterfly.
               She pulled herself up. She hurt all over, but she thought, I’ve had worse injuries than this. Even if it was a lie, it was useful. She focused, breathed, moved, ran for help.
               The monster was laughing behind her. Where was everyone? This town was her town, but it was empty.
               She screamed for help. Maybe they were too afraid of the Deep to help.
               “Stupid girl,” the monster said from right behind her, touching her hair.
               She jumped, whirling. When did he get there?
               The monster grabbed her right hand before she could wrench it away. “I’ll take that,” he said.
               So he did. He pulled at the wrist, and skin ripped like fabric and the bones snapped away and separated.
               For a second she felt nothing. It’s a dream, she thought. A dream, a dream. Because if it was real, it would hurt.
               Then it did.
               She fell back and thought of nothing as her hand was gone and the blood seeped down and onto her leggings and her hand was gone and she pulled herself along the grass with only one hand because the other hand was gone.
               She couldn’t even think of any good swear words. Couldn’t even think about the monster.
               She cracked open an eye and the bastard was chewing her hand. It crackled more than she expected, like it was made of toast.
               He licked his lips and saw her again.
               “Hm,” he said. “Ears?”
               No way in hell. She grabbed anything, everything, grass and dirt and pebbles and threw them at the monster. Weapon, weapon. The dust should at least blind him.
               “Huh,” the monster said. He snapped his arm down, slapping the earth, and she felt it on her stomach. He was yards away, but pinning her down with the force of his arm without touching her.
               What—she wanted to ask. What Deep does this? He shouldn’t be able—
               “Ears,” he said, and he bent down toward the nothing below him and bit. She felt it on her ear. Left, then right. He chewed. He swallowed.
               “And now,” he began.
               But she wasn’t listening. Because her ears were gone.
               So why could she still hear?
               Then she saw him over her, holding her down with actual touch. So she could touch him?
               He opened his mouth to bite wherever, and she jammed her one hand into his mouth and grabbed his tongue.
               Her hand phased through his tongue. She felt it. But she couldn’t move it.
               He closed his teeth and pierced her arm. Ripped it off.
               She kicked through her screaming, instinctively going for his crotch. He wasn’t human, maybe wasn’t male—or her touch failed again, like before.
               It’s not fair! she wanted to scream. He can touch me!
               She didn’t even know why he was attacking her. Had she done something to offend the Deep?
               “I’m sorry—” she tried to mutter.
               “For what?” the monster mumbled past his stuffed mouth. “You taste great.”
               Both his hands were occupied with his food. For a moment, she was free of him. It would do no good to run, but she had to be away. She rolled over and used her stump of a right arm to pull away.
               He laughed a gross still-eating laugh. “Where you going?”
               She didn’t answer. She was trying to think of anything, any smallest detail, that could have gotten her here. When she had fallen asleep, she was—
               Had she fallen asleep?
               What day was it?
               “Dessert,” the monster said, and burped. “Feet.”
               After the feet, it was hair. Then lungs and heart. Stomach. Eyes.
               Brain.
               She knew she was dead. At some point it would be over. She could not keep living.
               Instead, she headed down his throat and landed. Landed where?
               She tried to open the eyes that weren’t there. But she could still feel, through her brain or whatever part of her was still ticking. And she could hear.
               She heard what she had missed on the surface—people.
               People everywhere. She had somehow landed in the middle of a market.
               Dream, she thought. Stupid dream. Didn’t dreams end when you died?
               Chubby hands wrapped around whatever her was left and she was lifted off the ground.
               “Ooh, look!” an old woman’s voice cooed. “Another one!”
               “I got a leg!” a man from far away yelled.
               “Look, Mommy, it’s a eye!” yelled a child of five or so, and giggled.
               “Let’s put them all over here,” said a man with a very authoritative voice. “Hurry up, everybody, on the table.”
               From what she could tell, they were laying all of her acquired body parts neatly on a dirty wooden table. She could sense the other bits of her that were near. She could feel her fingers, and could almost move them. She couldn’t open her eyes, but she could tell they were lying face-down.
               She hadn’t realized that the pain had disappeared until it eased back.
               “Now,” a voice said. “What do we do with it?”
               “Put me back together,” she tried to say. Why not? It was probably good enough for dream logic.
               “You heard the lady,” a man said. “Let’s put her back together! I got some pants she can borrow.”
               They had heard her?
               There was a big flurry of movement, but it took a while for her to realize they were attaching her foot to her forehead.
               “You’re doing it wrong,” she mumbled.
               Someone had picked up an eye, and she saw the startled face.
               “Oh, really?” The teenager dropped the foot with a big shrug. “Well, what am I supposed to do?”
               “Feet go on the legs,” she said.
               “Well, now!” an old man said, and didn’t seem sarcastic. “Ya learn something every day.”
               She could see him now. His feet were attached to his legs. How had they gotten back together after being eaten?
               She instructed them every step along the way, too distracted by their ignorance to wonder why the skin and tendons were reattaching, or to blush at her nakedness. The market people probably had no idea she was naked, anyway. They were too busy praising her for knowing what humans were shaped like.
               Finally, they helped her into leggings and a dress and handed her a cloak and boots. She stood before them as a human again, pain quickly vanishing. Even her hair was back, somehow.
               “Wow,” said a gray-haired woman, the one who had found her brain. “You are a doctor, aren’t you?”
               “No.” She hoped she had assigned all her organs to the right places. It would be disconcerting if she could never pee again.
               “Well,” the old man asked, interrupting her own questions, “what’s your name?”
               She answered without thinking: “Smaller.”
               “Wow!” clapped a little girl. “What a wonderful name!”
               That was odd. Smaller wasn’t her real name. No one had called her Smaller since she was a child, when Finigh had assigned it to her. In return, Smaller’s nickname for Finigh was “Real”.
               But by now Finigh had grown up and probably forgotten all about that. Strange that the nickname should return now.
               But she’d always liked it. She thought it fit her. By now her given named seemed more like a stage name than anything else.
               So she didn’t correct it. Smaller she was.
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TWO

               “Where am I?” Smaller asked the crowd of marketgoers.
               “To the left,” said the man on her right.
               “Um….” Smaller hadn’t known there was a way for her question to be that complicated. “Are we inside the monster?”
               “Goodness!” the gray-haired woman chuckled. “You’re a pessimist, aren’t you? What a thing to call the world!”
               “You didn’t get eaten?”
               “Well,” the woman responded, “I’m sure I don’t know, do I? Does your food remember you?”
               Smaller wanted to ask a more specific question about the monster that had attacked her, but she didn’t know what it was called—or if these people would even recognize it if she did.
               But maybe she could figure out what was usual here.
               “What do the Deep look like?” she asked.
               “Deep?” a man asked. “Deep water?”
               “No, just the Deep. Haven’t you ever seen the Deep?”
               “Is this a philosophical question?” a nervous girl said, twirling her hair on her fingers. “Oh, no, I’m no good at those….”
               Smaller had never heard of anyone who had never come across one. “No—you know, those tiny magical creatures? Usually about—” She held her hands close together to demonstrate their size.
               Describing the Deep wouldn’t do any good. That was what she was asking them.
               “Never mind,” Smaller said.
               “No, thank you,” said a woman with a baby on her hip. “I like my mind where it is.”
               Smaller didn’t have any clue how to respond to that one.
               Think, Smaller. This was a problem. A puzzle. She could solve a puzzle. How could you get information out of people who were determined to understand nothing you said?
               If they didn’t understand her, then she had to start with something they did know.
               “You know how you all helped put me back together?” she asked.
               “That was fun,” giggled a girl of about seven.
               “Can we do it again?” The man looked eager to rip her apart right away.
               Hell no. “No, thanks.” Smaller wasn’t sure at first which question to ask. “Have you ever done that before?” Logically, the answer should be no. If they had, they would have a better idea how.
               “All the time,” said a man with big eyebrows, waving his hand like it was nothing. “I’m a bit of a tinkerer, you know. I tinker.”
               It was almost as if they deliberately answered wrong to everything she said. If that was true, it would at least make things simpler. It was easy to get information from someone who always lied, once you knew the rules. Maybe she just needed to listen to the exact opposite of everything they said.
               “I need to get home,” Smaller said. “Do you know how I can do that?”
               “Easy,” a teenage boy said. “Build a house here.”
               All right, maybe ‘easy’ had been an exaggeration.
               “Thanks,” Smaller said, “But I need to leave.”
               “But you only just moved here!” cried a blonde woman.
               Smaller wasn’t sure whether to roll her eyes and sigh loudly or laugh. She held back both. “I know. But I have to.”
               “No, you don’t!” a boy said. “You can’t!”
               If she was right, then this boy was saying that she could.
               “If I could,” Smaller said, “How?”
               “No.
               The boy’s face and body changed so fast it made Smaller jump. Everyone else was still as happy and clueless as every—but he was different.
               He was angry. Dark. A threat. The kind of threat her father had trained her for.
               Smaller still stood against the table the crowd had used to rebuild her, so she couldn’t step back. She couldn’t dodge to the side or she’d run into another person. Instead, she stood up straight and held her hands calmly at her size. You cannot take me down, she wanted him to know. You don’t want this fight. If she didn’t seem like a victim, he was less likely to start anything.
               The boy just stared at her. One of the women to Smaller’s left was chattering on about something. What was that? Smaller tried to keep an eye on the boy.
               “—and I’m sure we can find a bed for you!”
               “I told you,” Smaller said, “I—”
               A scream from the angry boy’s mouth. Then he jumped over the heads of the two kids in front of him and came at her fingers-first.
               Damn.
               What is this?
               Smaller grabbed at his wrist and ducked, slamming him directly onto the table as hard as she could. He bounced off of it like it was rubber.
               No way. That wasn’t fair. It was wooden—it was hard. How was she supposed to fight when the rules kept—
               A hand grabbed her hair from behind. Not the boy—he was in front of her. The hand whipped her down, losing her balance as the boy pulled out a knife from a pocket he didn’t have a moment ago.
               It’s okay, she thought for a moment. I came back from the dead once.
               But ever since the Deep attack, no rule had stayed consistent. How did she know this one would?
               “What are you doin—” Her question was muffled by a third person’s hand on her throat.
               “You can’t leave,” the boy said. “We won’t let you.”
               The Deep had to be behind this, somehow. It was holding her here. Nothing about these people made any sense—there had to be something magical behind it, and the Deep were the world’s only source of magic.
               Weren’t they?
               As Smaller watched, the boy’s blade was growing longer.
               Smaller closed her eyes.
               It’s not real, she thought. And because it’s not real, they can’t kill me.
               She didn’t know if it was true or not, but a monster had already tried to kill her once. No matter what they did, her father’s mantra of “survive, survive” would ring true.
               Smaller felt a sting on her arm, and noticed she had pulled her arms up to block the blade without thinking. It stopped short of her face, digging into her skin but not killing her.
               She still couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. But she still wanted this boy, real or not, to know she still wasn’t a victim. She looked at him and smiled smugly.
               “You’re staying here,” he said. He pried the knife from her flesh and tried again.
               “Survive,” her father kept saying. “Survive. Protect.”
               Protect.
               The boy’s arm moved, and a rock clipped the side of his head, knocking him to the side and spilling blood on the cobblestone square. In surprise, the mystery hands left Smaller for a second, and she rolled, barreling through someone’s legs, and stood.
               The stone thrower was a young boy, someone from the crowd who hadn’t spoken before. He held another two rocks at the ready and looked at her.
               Protect.
               She had always been taught to protect. Everyone she knew as a child was bred for only that, protect, protect. Even Finigh had had someone to protect.
               Smaller shot forward, pushing startled marketgoers out of the way as she made her way toward the one friendly face.
               “Get her!” screamed the knife wielder. “Don’t let her leave!”
               Whatever this knife-crazy maniac thought he was protecting, he was willing to kill for it. Well, so was she.
               No one seemed to be after the child with the rocks. A few more crowd members were moving through the sea of people after her, but she wasn’t stopped as her hand grabbed the young boy’s shoulder.
               Smaller didn’t have many seconds before her attackers caught up. She decided to be patient. “What’s your name?” she asked the child.
               The boy was probably about nine, and he seemed frozen as his gaze inched its way up to hers.
               “Aum,” he said slowly. “To sound like Autumn. It’s supposed to be a boy’s name.”
               Some part of Smaller was still insisting that none of this was real. She liked being smart. She didn’t want a dream to fool her.
               But if this was real, if any part of this was….
               Smaller held out her hand, ready to run and feel the knife wielder’s breath on her back.
               “Follow me, Aum,” she said. “Let’s keep each other safe.”
               Aum stared and went white as though she had suggested jumping into the ocean. But his fingers wove across hers, and together they thumped along the street. At first he was almost the one dragging her away.
               Smaller may not understand where she was, but she remembered how the world used to be. Whatever it might mean, she was not like the others here.
               Which meant she was the only one who could get the real world back.
               She heard a familiar roar. She stopped in her tracks almost completely, only running as fast as Aum could cart her along.
               But she twisted, and saw the monster that had eaten her.
               He had eaten her. So why was he here?
               And what was he doing to….
               Smaller was distracted as Aum pulled her behind the corner of an old stone building. Now free of the wall of people, she could see that these buildings surrounded the square, businesses on the first floor and houses on the second. These people lived in the monster’s belly—
               No. Not inside the monster. He was right here. His stomach was, what, a portal? Sounded crazy enough to be true today.
               But Smaller peeked out from the edge of the stone wall and saw the monster again.
               The crowd didn’t seem to notice he was there. A man stood next to him, chatting with the woman beside him.
               The monster bent over, and sank his teeth deep into the man’s shoulder. There was no reaction at first. No cry of pain, not even a drop of blood. The monster didn’t rip flesh off and chew. Instead, he let go and turned to a new marketgoer.
               The wound on the bitten man stood out even from this distance, a deep smudge of purple on his slick gray tunic.
               A moment later, the bitten man untied the belt from his waist and held it in his hand like a whip. He spotted the knife wielder, screamed in a frenzied rage, and joined the attackers.
               Aum was pulling at Smaller’s arm again. She followed him as he snuck into the building and silently eased shut the door. Aum led them through a flower shop and up the stairs to the owner’s living room, although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was going.
               “It’s the monster,” Smaller muttered. “He’s making everyone crazy.”
               “I don’t know what’s happening,” Aum said quietly.
               Smaller wrapped her arm around Aum’s shoulders and tried to peek out the window without being seen.
               “Once we find out,” she said, “then we kill the monster.”
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THREE

               Smaller could hear the growing cries from the crowd outside as the monster without a name poisoned them one by one. She decided that they didn’t know where she and Aum were, and turned to survey the little room. It was free of toys and mess. Nothing was broken or even worn. It didn’t seem like a place a child lived.
               “Why did you take me up here?” she asked Aum, who was wandering across the room, keeping away from the window.
               Aum shrugged. “It was away.”
               Good enough answer. “Do you know who lives here?”
               “Me.”
               That surprised her. Aum didn’t seem to be wrong about everything, like the others had been earlier. Right now, he was inspecting everything, including the rug and the ceiling.
               “Then why don’t you know your way around?” she asked.
               “Why should I?” Aum saw a door down a hall and pointed. “Let’s go that way.”
               Memories, Smaller thought. No one seemed to have any proper memories but her. Whether Aum and the others had been born here or brought here from her world, their memories didn’t seem to function the way real ones should. Maybe the monster’s bite stole memories.
               But the monster hasn’t bitten Aum. If it had, he wouldn’t have saved her. He would be hunting her, wouldn’t he?
               Aum opened the door and looked back at Smaller. She followed him and felt a damp breeze.
               She stepped through the door and found stairs and seagull cries. The walls stopped, the ceiling stopped. Above her the sky was blue. Below her, the stairs led down to a wooden deck on a beach.
               Aum was halfway down the stairs, moving carefully but quickly. He didn’t seem to notice that they seem to have stepped through another portal.
               The wind turned cold and a seagull left its waste in Smaller’s hair. She followed Aum down as she tried to wipe it away.
               “Where are we?” Smaller asked.
               “Sand,” Aum said, reaching the deck and stepping onto the golden sand.
               “I see that,” Smaller said. She turned around and saw no sign of any other building from the square. They were on a beach in every direction. “Did you know there was a beach behind your house?”
               “Why not?” Aum said.
               “Because this isn’t anywhere close to where we were.” Given everything, Smaller couldn’t bring herself to sound surprised. If the monster’s stomach was a portal, that doorway must have been another. The question was whether the angry marketgoers—or the monster—would follow them here.
               “So?” Aum reached down and picked up a small stick and a large shell that the water had left behind. He mindlessly tapped as he talked.
               “So, usually, you only walk to nearby places. What usually happens when you go out that door?”
               Aum shrugged. “I guess I’ve never gone before.”
               “You have an entire room in your house—” Well, a beach in his house “—that you’ve never been in before? Weren’t you curious?”
               “Never seen that door before.”
               “How long have you lived there?”
               “I don’t know.” Aum seemed nervous. His tapping was growing frenetic.
               “Sorry,” Smaller said, picking up a seagull feather from the sand next to him. She playfully tapped his shell with it, like with his stick. “I didn’t mean to grill you. Let’s talk about something else.”
               Aum held the stick by the middle and flicked it back and forth, tapping on the shell with both ends. It sounded like drums, getting two sounds out of one hand playing.
               Smaller was about to say something about how they should get going, but she stopped when she heard his rhythm. She took a few more moments to confirm, and then she smiled.
               “You play, don’t you?” she asked.
               Aum looked up at her. “Play what?”
               “Play drums,” she said, pointing at his hands. “Maybe not the same kind as where I’m from, but you definitely have rhythm.”
               “Really?” He grinned and his tapping sped up. “What song am I playing?”
               Smaller laughed. “I’m new here! I don’t know your songs!”
               “I’m new here, too. I’ve never been through the door, I told you.”
               Smaller smiled. “Fine.” She listened for a moment. Then she frowned. “It sounds like…sounds like a favorite song of a friend of mine.” Trei had loved a song passed down through his family. He used to sing it in his grandmother’s voice. It had made Smaller laugh. It wasn’t a well-known by any stretch of the imagination. How did Aum know it?
               He wasn’t using pitch or words. Many songs had similar drumbeats. It could easily have been coincidence.
               “Sing along!” he said.
               “Sorry,” she said. “Don’t know the words. And you’re probably playing something totally different.”
               “That’s okay!” Aum said. “Just do something!”
               “Then repeat what you’re doing,” Smaller said. “I’ll listen, and join in next round.”
               Aum rolled his eyes. “But I might do something different next round!”
               “Then don’t.”
               “But I might!”
               “Well, I can’t just jump in unless I know what you’re doing.” She tapped quietly with her fingers, trying to memorize what he was doing so she could plan a melody to sing.
               “That’s ridiculous,” Aum said. “Songs are no fun if they go the same way every time.”
               Somehow, that seemed sillier than anything else that had happened that day. She couldn’t help laughing. “What does that mean?” she asked. “If your song is no fun, then that means that you need to fix it!”
               “By playing something else,” Aum said.
               “By getting it right,” Smaller said. “And you can’t get it right if you don’t know what your partner is doing.”
               Aum stopped playing suddenly. “What do you mean? How do you know something like that?”
               “You ask, I guess. And practice.”
               “But what if they change their mind?”
               “Why would they—”
               Smaller suddenly realized who she was talking to. He lived in a place where the inside of a monster turned into a market and the back of a townhouse turned into an isolated beach.
               No wonder the people here didn’t remember anything. They weren’t used to anything remaining consistent. Wooden tables became rubber. Dismembered bodies assembled themselves. Your friends turned and tried to kill you.
               How had Aum turned out as normal as he was?
               “Aum,” Smaller asked, “Why did you help me?”
               Aum looked up and Smaller noticed that his eyes had lost all trace of the terror they’d held at the market.
               “Helped you when?” he asked.
               Smaller sucked in a quiet breath.
               Damn it, Aum, not you. She felt like stepping back. She felt like dragging Aum back through the door, back to the market and the danger and the monster, just so he would remember fighting with her.
               She looked away. “Never mind.”
               The cold wind turned colder. Sand blew in Smaller’s face.
               Sand became pebbles. A rock scraped her cheek. Smaller winced and turned to look into the wind.
               The beach was….
               “Sh—” Smaller glanced at Aum. “—Crap.” Didn’t matter whether he would remember her word choice. Didn’t matter that they were suddenly on a beach.
               Because the wind was blowing from down the beach and the beach was rolling up toward them like a blanket. Sand dunes turned upside down, dumping their endless sand like an hourglass. Fish fell from the top of the loop to the bottom, and then pushed back up the side again.
               The beach was rolling up. They were the inside of a mile-long sand quesadilla. They were going to be crushed by the underside of a freaking beach.
               “What is that?” Aum said.
               “Run,” Smaller said, grabbing his hand again and taking off with him.
               The rolling was slow at first, but now it seemed to be picking up speed. Every time Smaller looked back, she felt a surge of panic.
               Every time she looked at Aum, she wondered if he would remember the danger in ten seconds. If he forgot, he would stop running and be flattened.
               The monster’s behind this, she thought. Got to be him. How? Was he invisible? She had watched him sprout wings once. Maybe he could grow….
               “Real, look!” Aum screeched to a stop and pointed just as Smaller saw it. The same thing was chasing them from the other direction. If they outran the first, the second would get them.
               Maybe, if they reached the exact middle where the two met, there would be room for them to sit without getting touched?
               Wait.
               Smaller turned and stared at Aum, something in the pit of her stomach looming just as scary as the beach trying to crush her. Something is wrong.
               “Aum,” she said, “what did you call me?”
               He frowned and looked at her.
               “What are you—”
               Aum’s sentence was cut off. By—
               By nothing.
               It took a moment for Smaller to realize, like eyes adjusting to a darkness. A darkness thicker than everything else.
               All of Smaller’s senses had switched off. Aum was gone. The beach was gone. Sound was gone. She floated, standing on nothing.
               Everything was missing.
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