Bones Are White (The Color Series: a collection of Scott Sigler Short Stories Book 2) by Scott Sigler

Author:Scott Sigler [Sigler, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Empty Set Entertainment
Published: 2012-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

It’s Magic & Shit

We rode the elevator down. Deck Eighteen is a lot bigger than the other decks. It’s more like Decks Eighteen through Twenty-Two, just without floors or ceilings in-between. Crazy shit goes down on Deck Eighteen, or “Day-Teen” as the locals call it. It’s just one deck above the refinery level. It was once a maintenance deck, so crews could move about above the refinery equipment and drop down to just the spots that needed repair. As such, it doesn’t have the best ventilation, noise baffling or general safety features built into Decks Seventeen through One. Deck Eighteen wasn’t even meant for habitation.

Fifteen years ago, just about the time I got here, I think, a big tax bill funded construction of maintenance pods that cling below the refinery deck. Safer for the maintenance crews and more mobile, they made a big difference in equipment up-time and wound up making New Hoboken more profitable. As Carney Powers would say, everybody won.

Since Deck Eighteen wasn’t needed for maintenance, and it wasn’t up to code for habitation, it was left vacant. It didn’t stay vacant for long. The New Hoboken’s rejects—the people who couldn’t afford a place to live, the people who couldn’t find an above-board job, the junkies and the vagrants and the bums and hookers who made the Deck Seventeen working girls look like movie stars—they slowly drifted down to Day-Teen and stayed there. Know how on planets, gravity makes all the silt and detritus sink to the bottom of the ocean? Yeah, that’s Deck Eighteen.

The cops didn’t like to go to Deck Seventeen. As for Deck Eighteen? They just pretended it didn’t exist at all.

Deck Eighteen, that wretched hive of scum and villainy, happened to be the abode of a man they call the Magician. No one knew his real name. Some thought he couldn’t possibly have a real name because he’d conjured himself out of thin air. People who believe that magic is real are fucking retards; there’s a lot of retards on New Ho.

“Maybe we should just bail,” Brock said. “We could take the next shuttle out. Maybe head for Uranus.”

“Isn’t that Carney’s job?”

“Know what, Rabbi? Sometimes you’re kind of a dick.”

That was true. When I get stressed, I start ripping on people. “Sorry, Big Ugly. Look, if we leave, what do we do then? What do we do for money?”

He shrugged. “Well, I can get fights. You can be my manager.”

“Which is a great idea, except we’re running from Chad LaTilton. Your name up in lights might make it easy for him to know where we are.”

Brock thought for a second, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“We have to talk to the Magician,” I said. “We can either see him now or run and maybe see him later. That’s a kind of seeing him later that neither of us wants.”

Brock actually shuddered. He shuddered.

“Yeah,” he said, “I don’t want a sorcerer coming after me.”

“He’s not a sorcerer. He’s a magician.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A sorcerer is a mythological construct created by primitive cultures to explain inexplicable phenomenon.

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