Thresholder

Perry didn’t return to the Natrix. Instead, after a day of waiting to see whether anything would change, he flew north, to meet the other cousins.

“Well, well, well,” said a man in oil-stained coveralls who’d come from his home to meet with Perry.

The mechs were splayed out over a field. To Perry’s eye it seemed pretty difficult to defend, but they had plenty of weapons and a healthy perimeter. He’d been on the planet for two years, but almost all of that time had been with the Natrix, and if not them, then aboard the cramped Crypt. He wasn’t sure how things went here, but trusted that they knew what they were doing.

The Kjärni had gone in a radically different direction with their designs, and it made Perry a little nervous to know that there were essentially two dozen amateur nuclear reactors sitting around in the field. If the Natrix was a centipede, then he had to liken them to beetles, beetles with their wings spread wide. The wings were for venting excess heat, he was pretty sure, delicate structures that would never have any hope of lifting the massive machines up into the sky.

There were, as on the Natrix, plenty of guns. Some of them were pointed at him, but the Kjärni had known that he was coming, and he trusted them not to kill him. Most were for the bugs.

“Peregrin Holzmann, the man himself, broker of peace, deflector of bullets, went toe-to-toe with the last functional elder mech and lived to tell the tale.” The man smiled wide. Perry was pretty sure his name was Birger, if he was the one who Perry had spoken to over the radio.

“I didn’t go toe to toe with it,” said Perry. “I won.”

“Well, there’s some confusion on that,” said Birger. He leaned against his metal doorframe. “You know, I heard you turned into an animal, and apparently that wasn’t meant as a metaphor.”

“There’s video,” said Perry. “You’ve seen it.”

“We’ve seen it,” nodded Birger. “That doesn’t mean we believe it.”

“I’m not here to litigate that,” said Perry. “I’m here to call in favors. Leticia and Mette can’t know, not until it’s over, but if there’s anything that you need, I can make sure you get it.”

Birger looked around him, at the hulking beetles with their spread wings, and chewed on his lip a bit. “Well, we’ll help you. But you misunderstand us, I think. It’d be hard not to if you’re only talking to them. What do you need?”

“Armaments,” said Perry. “But we can talk about that later.” He took a breath. “If it’s alright with you, I’d like to talk about other things, read you in on what’s going on, because there are things that you don’t know.”

“You think I have the time for all that?” asked Birger. He scratched his head. “Well, I suppose I could make time, if it’s for the great Peregrin Holzmann.”

“Thank you,” said Perry.

Perry was worried about a lot of things, the biggest of them being the fate of the Natrix, but with Jeff, the largest impediment to winning a fight felt like the fact that absolutely all of Perry’s secrets were out in the open. Jeff had to have seen the mechawolf fight, in full detail, and had decided that he had a way to deal with it, which might just have been brute strength.

The limits of the pastwatch were unclear, but from everything that had come over the radio and a review of the video, Perry thought that it was actually fairly limited. Jeff seemed like he was using a combination of cold-reading and scattershot pastwatching more than he was immediately gaining infinite knowledge. Maybe it was like rapidly scrubbing through video footage to find the good bits, or like skimming a document to pick out a keyword. It also didn’t seem like Jeff was a polyglot, which wasn’t going to matter here, but would interfere with his ability to check over the Great Arc.

It wasn’t clear to Perry whether the pastwatch’s ‘lock’ included the present, or only the last time they had seen each other, but if Jeff could spy on Perry’s immediate past, which was essentially the present, he was keeping that close to his chest. Perry had two options: he could try to provoke Jeff into revealing previously unseen powers, or just forge ahead with the assumption that the pastwatch ability didn’t give Jeff broadly powerful remote monitoring. Perry was going with the second option, mostly because he trusted that Jeff was a gloater who found a lot of fun in talking about himself and how awesome he was. It didn’t seem in-character for Jeff to hide a power that was actually much more than just looking into the past. It was certain that Jeff still had tricks up his sleeve, but they probably weren’t that, at least not in Perry’s estimation.

He was hoping that wasn’t wishful thinking.

Birger went into the mech, which was the size of a large building, bigger than a post office, smaller than a high school. Six long legs held it up, but only just high enough off the ground that it was clear of the rocks and oversized reeds that made up the ‘field’. The interior was surprisingly homey, and Perry saw people scramble out of the way once they were past the foyer, giving the two of them a long table with a dozen chairs around it for themselves. The table was made of varnished reeds, precisely cut and finished to be flat and smooth. It had the look of an antique, old and well-loved.

“This is you and your family?” asked Perry as he took a seat. He removed his helmet as a courtesy, and to make sure that his face could be read.

“And a few stragglers we’ve picked up,” said Birger. There was a brief moment when he looked at Perry as though he was going to comment on his face, but it passed quickly. “It happens now and again.”

“And this all runs off a nuclear core?” asked Perry. “There’s a reactor somewhere in there?”

“Both types are nuclear,” said Birger. “This one is the one that we can make on the planet, the one that the Natrix disdains.” He smiled slightly. “You fell in hard with them.”

“I did,” said Perry. “I’m sorry I never got a chance to visit.”

“Now’s the time, it seems, with your conflict brewing,” said Birger. “Tell me, what do you need?”

“The man that’s after me, he can look at my past,” said Perry. “I was hoping to at least make it a little bit of trouble for him. More for him to scan through, conversations that are irrelevant to him.”

“Hrm,” said Birger. “He doesn’t have a docile AI to do it for him?”

“I don’t think it works like that,” said Perry.

“We’ve heard of your Marchand,” said Birger. “We’ve spoken to him, in fact, with the satellite access you’ve granted us. We could speak of that, if you’re eager to have a conversation to cloak what you really want to discuss.”

“Sure,” said Perry. “And you still have your elder mech running your computer systems, right? We could put Marchand on that hardware, it’s what we did for the Natrix.”

“We have principles,” said Birger. “We don’t rely on anything that we can’t make for ourselves. So no, that wouldn’t be a good thing to do, and we don’t use the pieces of the elder mech in the same way the Natrix does theirs.”

“You don’t?” asked Perry.

“We don’t use the microchips from the ice either,” said Birger. “Or we’re not supposed to. Sometimes we do, but we don’t rely on them. There was almost a war two years ago, a war, and it was because there are two communities that aren’t self-sufficient. So no, we haven’t organized ourselves around linchpins that we can’t repair or replace indefinitely.”

There were other things on Perry’s mind, but he indulged his curiosity. “Eventually you’re going to run out of metal,” said Perry. “Or uranium, or whatever you’re using for fuel.”

“Do you understand how much there is on this planet?” asked Birger. “We haven’t made a fraction of a dent in what’s available. If we expanded a thousand times over, we might have to worry about what happened a few generations hence.” He shrugged. “The bigger problem is that we only get a shot at a good deposit every now and then, when the terminator passes over.”

“I can help with that,” said Perry. “There are all kinds of tools that you haven’t asked for and the Natrix hasn’t offered.”

“We don’t want your tools,” said Birger. “They say that you’re going to have your fight and leave. What happens to the satellites you put up ten years from now? They fall down, and everyone has to scramble to figure out how to live without them.”

“Two issues there,” said Perry. He held up his fingers, which was slightly awkward in the suit, and called attention to the armor. “First, there’s work that the satellites can do that would never need to be replicated without them, maps and scans that can just live on a hard drive, or maybe even just paper. Mapping doesn’t need to be done by multiple generations, it needs to be done once.”

“Not here,” said Birger. “The snow hides things. You can map the day side, but the night side? You’d be hard-pressed. And most of what we need wouldn’t be seen well from space, not with a lack of light. But what’s your second point?”

“There are things we can give you that wouldn’t need dependence on us in any way,” said Perry. “New technology, new ideas, information, that sort of thing. Things that, when built, would be built with your own hands, not ours.”

Birger frowned. “You know that I’ll give you your tools or weapons, don’t you?”

“You haven’t heard what I’m asking for,” said Perry.

“We know you’re a warrior,” said Birger. “From another world, they say, and having seen you fly like that, I have no problem accepting that’s true. You came to us with gifts, but we know what lurks in your heart. You offered us a chance to speak with the Natrix by satellite, and to Heimalis, and we assume that you’ve been recording all that talk as a matter of course.”

“We have,” said Perry. “Everything gets logged. I don’t know who, if anyone, is actually reading it, but it’s known not to be a secure channel. You could make it secure, you have the technology.”

“There’s not really a point to putting in the effort,” said Birger. He folded his arms and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Letting us talk to each other is a play for power, a way of showing off your might. Everything you’ve sent us speaks to your power, your prowess, everything about you, in particular. So we’ll help you, because you’ve done everything you could to show us what you are.” There was something defiant in him, even as he was admitted to capitulation.

Perry nodded. “I guess there’s no point in me arguing the issue, even if I think you’re wrong.”

“And what is it you need then?” asked Birger. “There are limits to what we can give.”

“Do you have a computer I can use?” asked Perry. “I’d rather communicate that way. It’ll be harder for him to see, if he looks into the past.”

Birger shrugged. “Go ahead.”

The computer was in another room, and it was even worse than the ones aboard the Natrix. There were a lot of things that they couldn’t make given the smaller scale of their colony and their insistence on not tying themselves to the power of legacy technology. As a result, a lot of what they had was noticeably worse. The plastics they used were more ubiquitous and had a weird texture to them, being almost grainy, but the keyboard operated just the same, and if the monitor was poor quality and the display was two-toned, that didn’t really matter all that much to Perry.

The nanites slipped in, of course, spiders moving down into the keyboard, across the circuitry, wedging themselves in place. It had been some time since Perry had done that, and he did feel bad about it, but he didn’t intend to take over the computer systems here, only to feed false information to Jeff. Whatever his other abilities, Jeff couldn’t read minds, and didn’t seem to be able to understand other languages.

The communications went off without a hitch, and the message was to Birger, the requirements and bounds of the problem. It was a request that depended on technology they should have on hand, and they were engineers in the same way that those aboard the Natrix were, capable of moving quickly if they had to. Maintaining these mobile reactors was incredibly difficult and dangerous, and they had done that. All he was asking for was for them to weaponize what they had.

There was some evidence that they had already done it, some readings that Marchand had unearthed. It was one of the ways that the Natrix stereotyped these people, calling them reckless and crazy, never minding the dangers and sometimes doing the dangerous thing just because they could. Perry would know for certain once Marchand had pulled everything from their computer systems, but Birger’s answer would be confirmation enough. It was possible that they wouldn’t have the materials, having done a small handful of tests and then thrown away the materials, but Perry was optimistic.

Birger read the message from the other room, then came back to Perry.

“We’ll get it done. Your timeline is two weeks?” he asked.

“It is,” said Perry. “That’s the hard deadline.”

“I’ll have it done in six days,” said Birger. So they do have it, Perry thought. “But I do expect those gifts in response.”

“Even though it violates your principles?” asked Perry.

“We won’t rely on anything you’re giving over,” said Birger. “But it might be nice, for a time. And if you can bring some southern delicacies, that would be all the better.”

Perry nodded. “Thank you.”

“Your enemy, will this bring his retribution on us?” asked Birger.

“No,” said Perry. He said it as though he was certain, though he wasn’t. “He’s concerned with his own pleasure, and with the thrill of the fight. That’s it.”

“And what are you concerned with?” asked Birger.

“The safety and protection of the people of this planet,” said Perry.

Birger laughed. “Ha! And yet we’ve been hearing, since we first heard of you, that you’re leaving this world for another. Is that not true?”

“It’s true,” said Perry. “But … it’s complicated.”

“You have to go save the whole multiverse, eh?” asked Birger.

“Something like that,” said Perry.

“You like the violence, and with your buddy dead, there won’t be anyone to fight,” said Birger. “So you have to go.” He nodded to himself.

“You don’t know me,” said Perry. His hands were on the table, and he was keeping himself from gripping it too hard. The armor had a lot of power, and it was easy to break things.

“No, I don’t,” said Birger. “And from everything I’ve heard, I’m better off for it. They venerate you on the Natrix as their savior, the man with amazing abilities, but most of what you’ve done for them has been with the point of your sword. They say you’re a master with a rifle, a king astride a mech, strong and fleet-footed. I hear all the things they don’t say about you. Not praised for your wit or your kindness.”

The words stung. Maybe this was just the Kjärni being the Kjärni, but it felt weirdly personal, like learning that he’d been slandered in a tabloid by people he had never taken the chance to know. He thought they would like him, if they got to know him, but so long as they could give him what they wanted, it really didn’t matter.

“There’s one more thing,” said Perry. “I need a place to stay.”

That Birger grimmaced at. “You can fly,” he said. “Can’t you sleep up in the air?”

“I can’t stay in the armor forever,” said Perry, though he was getting close, at least on a physical level. Psychologically, it was still a pretty long way to go.

“Sheltering you puts us at risk,” said Birger. He rubbed his chin. “There’s a promena you can use, but you’ll have to stay well outside the circle of protection. Come scuttling in if the bugs show up, but so far as anyone is concerned, you’re not here, and we didn’t help you.”

“Fair enough,” said Perry.

“You’ll remember this, won’t you?” asked Birger. “That you were helped, by us, in your time of need, willingly?”

“I will,” said Perry, though he wasn’t sure how much ‘willingly’ factored into it.

“Eh,” said Birger. “Well, I won’t count on it.”

It seemed incredibly rude to Perry, but he’d come to them hat in hand, and they had given him the response that he’d ultimately wanted. He tried not to be affronted and to let their disdain for him wash over him as though it was nothing.

~~~~

His time in the promena passed both quickly and slowly.

Every day, he thought it would be the day that Jeff would show up. They had set a time and place to meet, but it was clear that Jeff had no honor. At most, Jeff had a sense of drama, but that was a completely different thing, and if the sense of drama meant a sneak attack in the middle of the cycle, then that was probably what Jeff was going to do.

Leticia had him talking, but most of what he’d talked about wasn’t actually helpful. He had stories of the things he’d done on the worlds he’d been to, and once those seemed to be exhausted, stories about other thresholders whose pasts he’d seen into and the worlds they had been to, the fights they had been in. He considered himself superior to all of them, naturally, even the one man who’d beat him.

There was something mentioned a few times, which matched with what Xiyan had said: a Grand Spell. It wasn’t clear on what it was, or how you made it, but it was responsible for Candyland, and possibly the Witch Holes, and a third one that Jeff had seen secondhand, a world that was being constantly rewritten with only a handful of people keeping their memories of what had changed. There wasn’t much to unify those worlds except the suggestion that they hadn’t always been like that. Someone had changed the world from one thing to another, not a god or anything like that, but a mortal person pursuing their own goals.

There was a fourth Grand Spell, or something like it, one that Maya’s wizard friend had thought was responsible for thresholders. Perry listened to the relevant conversations with Maya again, and tried to place everything on an augmented-reality corkboard, but he just didn’t have enough information to make sense of it. Maybe it was the same mechanism, maybe it wasn’t. All the worlds presented to him were different, often radically so, and if there were others that had been the result of a world-ranging spell of some kind, it wasn’t clear which ones they were. There were so many aspects of the Rules that Perry simply didn’t know, and the more worlds he’d heard about, the less he was certain of.

He’d liked it better when he thought he had it all figured out.

He wasn’t even sure he understood the bare bones of what was going on with the thresholder ‘spell’, if that’s what it was. There were too many open questions, especially regarding what predictions it was making behind the scenes. He’d been placed on a space station where he would surely have died, away from the planet or any people, and then he’d spent two years on the planet. Was this a deviation, or just something at the edges of the bell curve, or something else? Too much of what he knew had been told to him by highly unreliable narrators who had obvious conflicts of interest in sharing the whole truth with him. Even Maya, who was more or less a friend, was suspect.

Perry listened to everything Jeff said, making notes the whole time. This was good for the academic tether, which had plateaued in power over the last year, fed mostly by regular attempts at developing magical talent and some secondary learning from the resources aboard the Natrix. He now understood the basics of computer programming, the very basic basics, which the academic tether had responded to. Compared to even a small child, he was awful, and there would never be any use for the skill, not when he had Marchand.

It took Jeff three days to tire of Leticia, and when he did, there were other ‘volunteers’. Perry found it sickening, and tried not to think about it too much. He had no real idea how much there was an element of duress involved, and when he imagined the same scenario with the genders reversed, a sexy but dangerously psychopathic woman demanding to be ‘entertained’, he could see that there might be some real appeal.

The site of the battle was selected carefully, a place on the hot edge of the twilight zone, wide open. Jeff agreed to it, and a date was set. It wasn’t how Perry would have preferred to fight, and there was always a chance that Jeff would get bored early and lash out, or that there would be a distinct lack of honor. Perry himself didn’t care much for honor, not if it got in the way of winning, and he was fairly sure that Jeff would know that about him. Jeff wasn’t only using the downtime for elaborate meals and sex, he was using it to comb through the past and watch Perry, which was aggravating.

It took Birger nine days, not six, but when he’d finished, he handed both the items over with a sniff of satisfaction.

“The first was easy, the second was a bit more difficult,” he said. “Not sure that it will work, truth be told, but you said you’d prefer not to test it, and I’d prefer not to test it, and of course, I’d rather you take it far, far away from here.”

“Don’t say any more,” said Perry. “I’ll take the promena, and be back shortly.”

“Not too shortly,” said Birger. “Distance is what I’m hoping for, you understand?”

“I understand,” nodded Perry.

But of course, Perry didn’t go himself. Doing it himself might open him up to being spied on through the pastwatch, and that couldn’t be allowed. So instead, he sent the promena off on its own to gallop across the lands, instructed by Marchand, dodging bugs and racing to the location where the fight was going to take place. It had two small robot arms for the task. The instructions to Marchand had been given by touch-typing on a virtual keyboard that Perry couldn’t see, which felt like it should be proof against most possible options for pastwatch.

While the promena was going off, Perry flew high up into the sky with the sword and looked out over the twilight band, trying to make it seem like he was doing something interesting. He spoke to Marchand in Japanese, which was one of the languages that had been loaded up before leaving Earth 2, also in the hopes that it would seem like this was worth scrubbing through and trying to work out.

So far as Perry could tell, one of Jeff’s major weaknesses was that he didn’t understand technology. Computers were foreign to him, and the only world with computers that he’d been to was a prison world where he was locked out of all the systems and never had a chance to educate himself. Everything else that Jeff had learned about technology had come secondhand. There was information on the Natrix, but that was controlled by Esper, Marchand’s clone, and at a suggestion from Marchand, certain information had been quietly removed from the local Gratbook, not that Jeff seemed like he was spending much time reading. When he did read, it was fiction, though he seemed just as likely to lay there in his bed — Perry’s old bed — closing his eyes and presumably putting all his attention on the past.

The promena took five days to go and then come back. Perry didn’t discuss what it was doing with Marchand. This seemed like one of the only ways to keep things secure, which is what Perry desperately wanted. In theory, if the plan went off without a hitch, there wouldn’t even need to be a fight.

The day before the fight was scheduled, Jeff disappeared. He was filmed stepping out onto the balcony of the penthouse and then rocketing up into the air, but he was gone before anyone had much of a chance to notice. The last thing he’d done was to have a threesome, and he’d been strangely quiet for the last few days, not talking as much as usual.

The appointed site was away from the bugs, in a place that was much hotter than their natural habitats. There were still a few around, but it was hot enough that the plants were quickly desiccated, and the bugs were smaller, munching on the dried out reeds and vines. It was the site of a crater impact, though not a crater lake. It was easily visible from the air, not just because it was a hole in the ground, but because the plants there could last a bit longer than their counterparts up on hot ground, though in time, the crater would be roasted in the same way that everything else would.

Perry was five miles away, hidden among the plants, waiting and watching through a number of cameras and other pieces of equipment that had been placed around the crater. Marchand had made a composite of all the rather poor angles, which only just captured Jeff as he came in.

Unfortunately, Jeff didn’t make a landing. He instead hovered in the air, a mile up.

“Alright Perry, show yourself!” called Jeff. His voice was unnaturally loud and booming, audible to every microphone in the area, some kind of magic, though it wasn’t clear which. The dragon’s heart, maybe? “I’m not going down there. While I can’t say I know a trap when I see it, I know the kind of man who sets a trap.”

Perry said nothing, whether through the speakers or otherwise. He wanted Jeff to land in the crater.

“Did you think I’d set up a place for us to fight and then actually use it?” asked Jeff. “I’m not a moron. People keep making that mistake. It would be funny if it weren’t so insulting. So come on, let’s go somewhere else, a second location, a place where I don’t have to worry about you pulling out the big guns.” Jeff was looking around, frowning. “You’re not around, I could sense if you were, but you’ve got to have eyes on this place.”

Perry held his breath. A mile away wasn’t quite close enough. When Jeff had been shot by the big gun, he’d fallen into his shelfspace with almost zero warning. The whole thing had lasted for, at most, two frames, which translated to mere fractions of a second. Jeff was fast, and could retreat into safety in an eyeblink. If he was going to be killed with a single swift strike, it would need to be more power than even the largest of the guns could give, and it would need to happen so fast he couldn’t dodge into safety.

“Land you stupid fuck,” Perry muttered.

“Alright, fine, let’s talk stakes here,” said Jeff. “You come here, now, or I race on back to the Natrix and start killing people, and then we have the battle there. You have some kind of trap down there, and I admit I’m curious what it might be, but it’s the appointed time, and you’re not here, which to me means explosives. Some kind of bomb, right?”

“Shit,” Perry muttered. “March, detonate it.”

March didn’t ask for confirmation. The flash of light felt like it was instant, and that was exactly what Perry had been hoping for. With the yield of the device, there should have been a lethal dose of radiation, and Jeff should have been blinded if he was looking right at it. A lethal dose of radiation wouldn’t kill immediately, but it would put him in a losing situation. Maybe the energy of it would kill him, some kicked up debris taking his head off or his skin being peeled, but there were too many imponderables.

“We’re going in,” said Perry. “Mark his last known location.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. It appeared on the HUD.

Perry stayed where he was until the shockwave went past, a blast of wind that was weaker than he’d thought it would be. Then he lifted up with the sword and looked at the mushroom cloud that was still in the midst of rising on the horizon. He flew toward it, aiming at the spot that was marked, but it was marked with a sphere, showing pretty significant uncertainty.

In theory, the portal might open at any time, and Perry could take it, leaving the world behind.

Perry saw no portal, and he was looking pretty hard.

This was a high-risk strategy. It hadn’t been meant as that. What Perry had hoped for was that Jeff would land directly next to the bomb and then get immediately vaporized before he could wonder what was under the vegetation in the crater. But a mile out, beyond the range of lethality for a normal person, that meant that Jeff might live, and who knew what he would do then? At best, it would be a fight between the two of them, with Jeff weakened. At worst … Perry didn’t know. Maybe Jeff would follow through on his threats and kill the people who’d been his hosts.

Perry was very aware that he was flying into a cloud of radiation. The bomb hadn’t been an airburst or anything like it, it had been in the ground, not buried, but so close that fission materials would be spread far and wide. The site would be a wasteland, but then, it was going to be a wasteland for at least another sixty years anyway.

“Let me know if there’s any sign of a body,” said Perry. “Anything that the cameras caught in their last moments.”

“Of course, sir,” said Marchand.

There was no snark, which somehow hurt more. Perry knew that recovering a body was a longshot, even in the event that Jeff had died.

When Perry arrived at the place where Marchand had marked, there was nothing but an approximate sphere indicated on the HUD. He stared at it, sword in hand, waiting. He wished that he’d brought the laser gun that Brigitta had made for him, but against an opponent that could move as fast as Jeff, it seemed like it would be next to useless.

“Come on you fuck,” said Perry. “Poke your head out.”

He hung there in the air, waiting, for nearly ten minutes. His mind was racing, and Marchand would occasionally chirp about the radiation, which was still well within what Perry had decided were acceptable levels. He’d gotten a large dose when fleeing the space station, but being second sphere had helped repair him, and he was pretty sure that was because it didn’t depend on DNA or anything like it. He’d had regular health checkups with the doctors of the Natrix, and they hadn’t found any lasting effects.

He was really hoping that Jeff didn’t have the same immunity and wouldn’t understand the damage.

When Jeff appeared, it was sudden, and Perry had been waiting long enough that he was startled by it. It was like a curtain had been pulled back in mid-air, almost right in the center of the place that Marchand had marked on the HUD.

Whatever healing power he’d used, the liquid he’d splashed over himself last time, it hadn’t worked nearly as well. His eyes were beet red, so bloodshot that it was impossible to see the whites, and his skin wasn’t much better. He’d been facing toward the crater when the blast happened, that was obvious, but Perry almost thought he could reconstruct the stance just on the basis of where his skin was white and where it was crimson. Most of the curling locks of hair were gone, and his pants were nowhere to be seen, except in a few places where they seemed to have been burned into his skin.

“See?” asked Jeff. There was blood on his teeth. “Knew you were a trap guy.” He looked at his beet red hand and winced. “Fucked me up, that’s for sure.” Blood ran down from his nose, and he licked it. “Some kind of poison. Didn’t seem like it was in your bag of tricks. So I think it’s time to show you what I’ve got.”