Death Cultivator by eden Hudson (best books to read .TXT) 📕

from under him and held it up, inspecting the holster.

“Not bad. I wish the gun had washed up, too,” she said. “Looks like he had one of the plasma emitters. Those bring in real money.”

“This is what you do?” I asked. “Search for dead bodies and take all their stuff?”

“If it’s useable,” she said, shrugging.

“I mean...Don’t you think it’s gross?”

She craned her neck and looked at me like she didn’t understand the question.

“Getting their fluids and stuff on you,” I clarified.

“It washes off.”

I nodded. “Rali was right, you really don’t care about social niceties.”

“Don’t they have corpses where you come from?” She sounded kind of defensive.

“Well, yeah, but we don’t touch them all over.”

“Then how do you get their valuables off?”

“I think people usually get buried with them. If they don’t, the mortician at the funeral home removes the valuables and gives them to the family.”

She went back to digging through the shark guy’s pockets. “I thought you seemed like a rich kid.”

My brain short-circuited at that. I spent so much time at school pushing back against jerkwads who called me poor trailer trash that I didn’t even know what to say to that.

All I could say was, “Are you kidding me?”

“Funerals are for rich people on foreign planets.” She opened the shark guy’s mouth, scanning his teeth. “Here, unless you’re a shogun, you get dumped. That’s how most of them end up in these washes. Although some probably get lost or trapped down in the Shut-Ins. You can wander a long time if you don’t have a map.” She dropped her voice and let out a low, “Yes!”

She grabbed a pair of needlenose pliers from her bag, then reached them into the shark’s mouth.

Phantom pain shot through my molars. “What are you doing?”

Kest grimaced, twisting her arm back and forth like she was really fighting with something in there. A couple seconds later, it popped loose. She held up a gold tooth pinched in the pliers.

“Buying my way off this trash planet to someplace rich,” she said, dropping the tooth into a smaller pocket on the side of her bag. “Somewhere they can afford funerals.”

Chaos Creatures

THANKFULLY, NONE OF the corpses Kest looted blew up on us. When she’d finally picked them over, I helped her carry the stuff out to the water’s edge, where we gave it all a good rinsing.

“What about portals?” I asked, shaking some water off the gun belt. “Do you guys have those?”

“You sound like Rali.” Kest took the belt and stuffed it into her bag of salvage. “He loves those old sword legends, too.”

Even though I’d been trying not to get my hopes up, my stomach sank.

“So, they’re not a real thing in this world?”

She shook her head. “Theoretically, it should be possible for wormholes to exist, but experiments by the most powerful Celestial supertypes haven’t been able to produce any.”

I took a long breath and blew it back out, staring down at my reflection in the water.

“So, I’m stuck here.” I’d meant for it to come out as a question, but it didn’t.

In the water, I saw Kest look at me. She opened her mouth to say something, then shut it, grabbed a gold chain she’d taken off one of the bodies, and sloshed it in the creek, breaking up the reflection.

We rinsed the rest of the stuff without talking and stored it in her bag. Then we hacked our way back through the tangle of willows to Rali.

He was sitting in the shade in the lotus position, meditating.

“How was it?” He cracked an eyelid. “Juicy, right?”

“I don’t hear you complaining when you’re buying spices,” Kest said.

“I don’t hear you complaining when you’re eating stuff cooked with spices,” he said.

It hadn’t exactly gotten dark while we were back in that corner, but the night sun was fully in the sky now, the whole orb and its bloody-orange halo. The blue sun was down, and the white was on the western horizon ready to drop. What the twins had said about chaos creatures being able to hunt freely when they day suns were down ran through my head again.

I nodded at the sky. “Should we be worried about that?”

“Worry is for people with too many worldly attachments,” Rali said. “But we should get out of the Shut-Ins. And running wouldn’t be the worst idea.”

We took off jogging upstream, the twins leading the way. Rali started to fall behind, so Kest and I slowed down a little. Not too much, though. The white sun was sinking, and the shadows were starting to get long and turn a weird purple-orange.

We ducked into a side canyon, then through a tunnel to another shut-in, which made me think of Kest’s warning that you could wander down here forever if you got lost. But Rali didn’t seem too concerned, and Kest checked her giant watch every few yards to give us directions.

In my peripheral, I thought I saw something dark and thin scramble up the cliff face.

“Don’t look!” Kest said. “Just keep running.”

Once someone says, “don’t look,” you basically have to. I turned my head, searching for it. I almost saw it. It was just out of the corner of my vision—

I tripped and went down.

“I said not to look!” Kest snapped.

She and Rali grabbed my arms, really hindering me more than they were helping me get back up.

“The shadow things are just a diversion to slow you down,” Rali explained. “Mostly.”

“Got it,” I said, stumbling back to my feet.

This weird sprinkling, whispering sound blew through the shut-in in a steady rhythm. It took me a second to realize what it was. Sand. Something was kicking up shovelfuls of the stuff as it ran.

Adrenaline shot through me, and my heart went into jackhammer mode.

“Let’s go!” Kest laid on the speed.

Rali and I sprinted after her. We turned one more time, up a narrow draw where the sky was just a crack in the darkness. Kest sprinted toward the rock wall. I didn’t see the chain ladder until