Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth by Cassandra Khaw

Author:Cassandra Khaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER TWELVE

“RUPERT, OLD CHUM, old pal, old ball and chain. The mightiest of all Asian recruits, master of dumplings, sovereign of chopsticks. How are you doing? Good. Of course you’re good. Why wouldn’t you be good? Say, I was going to ask, are you going to make a bet today?”

I knot apron strings behind my back, sluggish despite the four cups of coffee I’ve already consumed. Sleep had been difficult, haunted by nightmares of Ao Qin grinning up at me from the shower drain. And then there were the actual morning ablutions, which became an exercise in funerary attrition. I spent an hour disentangling tattoos from my epidermis, and then another hour figuring out how to unclog the toilet.

All in all, not a pretty morning.

“Aren’t you going to ask me about Jack?”

The fox flicks white-tipped ears forward, jaw hanging in a grin. A gray tongue laps over his nose. “No.”

No one cares that Jack’s gone. Then again, no one gave a damn when we lost the knockers in the first attack; their corpses were eventually crammed into black trash bags and left outside for collection.

The best the group ever musters is a threadbare sort of disgruntlement and even then, it’s never entirely holistic, contaminated by self-absorption. Forget the dead men/women/anthropomorphizations/things. What about the responsibilities they left behind?

(A thing worth thinking about, I suppose: when we die, will people weep or whine?)

Still, it was enough to make me leave the breakfast table in disgust, allowing them to bicker over cups of tepid coffee and stale scones, the rusalka lazily devouring fat sticks of butter. There aren’t many people that I like, fewer I trust, but I’d at least ponder a minute of silence, if one was serendipitously axed. Not rant on about bathroom duties.

Ang moh, am I right?

“I understand,” drawls the fox, as though my thoughts were printed on the air above my head. He sucks in a breath through yellowed incisors. “Such things are important to you and surely, they’re just as important to me. But Jack is Jack and Jack is dead, and Jack is a relic of older times. Poor, unfortunate Jack. Yes. So tragic. So terrible. But we can’t help the dead, can we? We can discuss the dead, but that’s hardly useful. What’s useful, though, is you telling me: are you going to place a bet or not?”

“Sure.” I pick up the mop, squeeze its tendrils dry of yesterday’s brown foam, plant it back on the ground, and push. “What am I betting on?”

A gleam of sharp teeth. “Thebet, obviously.”

I sigh. Sunlight slants through grime-clouded windows, gray, cold, unbothered by the rain. No one has stepped in yet, despite the ‘open’ sign hanging skewed from the door, a nervous entreaty to benefit from our free food. Maybe word of the massacre has finally gotten out.

“That’s not helpful, Reynard.”

He stiffens. A frisson coughs up his spine, hackles pluming. His brows pucker. “My name is not—”

“I know.” I stop him before he starts. “It’s a joke. It’s—”

Wood scrapes across linoleum.

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