Bone Jack

The person smelled like chalk, but chemical and antiseptic at the same time. That was Itzal impression before looking to see. And Itzal’s thought, before turning to look, was that the person had done a good job finding a spot to hide. Itzal felt like he would have seen this person. He didn’t fit in here.

The person thumped both hands on the iron rail next to the table. The hands were thin and bleached and wiry as sun-starved spiders, and they had something of that desperate groping quality even sitting still. They stuck from the ragged-ended sleeves of a black cloak, more shape and shadow than garment. It might have been the large and shapeless cloak that did it, but Itzal suspected that even without it the person in the cloak would look rather skeletal. But strong and unshakeable, like whipcord at the end of its arc, about to draw blood, and something of that flexibility too.

Unshakeable, except the shaking that seemed to come from inside the person. He looked sick. Drawn, white skin and dark around his yellowing eyes. Sick, and yet somehow unbreakable.

Before he said anything, he took a long breath, and his breath hissed.

When he spoke, his voice came like the hushing of wind over ice.

Itzal kept thinking these phrases to describe this Trouble person, and it made him shake his head. Descriptions like that had no place in real life, he figured.

So bemused by the train of thought, he, that he almost missed what Trouble had to say.

And what Trouble said was, “You were meant to be alone.” He said it to Lilywhite. Itzal looked at Lilywhite.

Lilywhite might have winked at Itzal, but that might have just been a flutter of his eyelash. He certainly smiled. Then he spoke to Trouble.

“We neither of us have much respect for propriety, have we?” Lilywhite asked.

“That seems…hardly…related,” Trouble said, scrabbling for words.

“Oh, I think it’s eminently related,” Lilywhite said. “Without a sense of propriety, why do we even maintain the pretense that our interaction even has rules?”

Trouble paused, as if considering the point. He looked at Itzal, with his jaundiced eyes. Itzal shrugged—the point seemed valid. Trouble looked back at Lilywhite. Lilywhite smiled.

What happened next happened too fast.

One of Trouble’s snake-strong, snake-swift hand caught Itzal around the neck. He pulled Itzal out of his chair, over the iron railing, and slammed him against the cobbles outside.

Before Itzal could fight back, something pricked the side of his neck. He felt a sensation he had felt once before. They had subjected the Bone Jacks to a variety of non-lethal poisons, so they would know how they felt.

This felt exactly like the one that had knocked him out.

In the short breaths before his mind shut down, Itzal did the only thing that, at the time, felt reasonable: He receded into a dream state. As a result, he didn’t notice when Lilywhite also collapsed, groping for the blow dart in his neck.