CLOCK, BUZZ, ANDRO

1560 4D

Grendel was tired, and his leg was hurting, but Jeddin‘s invitation had made him curious. He limped into the entrance of Buzzchicken, found a table, and sat heavily.

Thringe: he had heard the name, he wasn’t sure where. Andros from the City had mentioned her in passing, when he’d shared drinks at Engrammatic after killing. He never talked about killing, and nobody asked him.

Killing built walls inside Grendel, higher and higher. He felt them like the confining stone of the City itself. It wouldn’t be too long before all his feeling for others was gone, and maybe then his clock would be finished. He was afraid of himself now, but he couldn’t stop.

He gestured for a brew with two fingers, and it came. He downed it, and scanned the dim room for any familiar faces. A man and an andro woman he didn’t know sat back in one corner, and andros were coming in in twos and threes to take tables around a small stage. The stage was empty.

A tall red-haired andro supervised the staff, moving purposefully among the tables, greeting visitors, calling to servers, making brief talk. He arrived at last at Grendel‘s table.

“Alone? I’m Kurind, this is my place. You mind sharing the table? We’re going to have a crowd here – a big bunch of miners up from Transellas. I’ll credit you a couple of brews.”

Grendel paused for a heartbeat. “All right.” He looked past Kurind for Jeddin. Maybe this wasn’t the right day.

A flurry at the entrance took Kurind away to greet the new arrivals. Grendel stared at his brew, its brown streaks striping the foam at the top. This was a waste – now he’d have to haul his bad leg back down to Engrammatic and wait for another bit of information that would let him intercept a City weapons shipment on the road.

Jeddin‘s voice made him jump, even though the words were quiet and spoken several strides away. "…Winjilles Thringe to sing for you here at Buzzchicken.”

Grendel stared hard at the group now entering, with Jeddin and a girl talking to Kurind as the others filed past. They walked slowly and with exhaustion, as if they’d come a long distance. Without stopping, they got onto the stage and dragged stools, chairs, and equipment into place to play.

The girl, wrists brown and purple with dried blood, got up in front of the others as the sounds of tuning instruments swelled and faded. “Teshill Slope,” she said.

As she sang, Grendel saw City understreets as if he was walking in them. He shook his head and drank, trying to keep the memories from crawling into him again. But the words and the chords slipped past his defenses, surged into his mind and spilled through his darkness, and he raised his head and watched her sing.

She knew. He heard the nightmares in her – she knew. It was worse than his darkness.

“What do you think?” Jeddin stood beside him.

Grendel‘s hands gripped the table’s edge so hard that the wood seemed to give under his pressure. He relaxed his fingers and said, “Who is she?”

Jeddin sat down. “This is Winjilles Thringe, or she is now. The original Thringe died in the City when her clock ran out.”

This sounded like another one of Jeddin‘s puzzles. “Don’t explain that. Let me listen to her some more.”

When the song finished, the whole band jumped up in the midst of the applause and circled a table loaded with food and drink, grabbing everything and devouring it like starved miners.

“Is she… are they going to do more?” Grendel asked after watching the feasting a while.

“Yes, but I’d better go warn them about stirring things up too much. This place stays hidden when the noise level stays low. I don’t want to see corpos pop in here, like they do at Engrammatic and Tytan’s Manor.” Jeddin walked over to the food table as two of the band got up on stage and began a hypnotic song with sexual lyrics that made everyone laugh at the end of each line. Soon the listeners started calling for Thringe, and she led the rest of the band back onstage, ignoring Jeddin, who gestured after her and then followed the group. Their energy seemed restored. She called out, “Clock!” and off they went.

Grendel looked over at Jeddin, who was waving his arms No No at her. This might get interesting. He left his table and moved quietly to a side wall as the band started getting deep into the tune and the words. The music slammed into him, the words spoke for him, and he had trouble resisting the urge to yell out the refrains with the others, anjive screeching and folding on itself above the insistent rhythms.

It got louder and louder, and dancers hurled themselves back and forth in the dark spaces between tables, somehow missing the servers, who were themselves bouncing to the multilayered pulse.

“Quick, come with me,” Jeddin said in Grendel‘s ear, and the two of them moved sideways toward the rear of the place. “This is going to go bad.”

It did.