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

“Kest!” Rali yelled, searching the sky frantically, arms out like he would catch her.

Except neither one of us knew where she was.

My heart stopped. She couldn’t have been more than halfway down. I tried to listen for her, but she didn’t scream, and I couldn’t tell if I’d heard her hit the ground or not. The log chain slamming into the dirt was too loud.

Rali turned in circles, arms out, yelling for his sister.

When the last bit of chain smacked the ground, the OSS gangsters cheered and yelled down a bunch of trash talk.

The Shogun’s yellow light started moving back toward Ghost Town.

Rali sank to his knees, chest heaving, the lace in his eyes thinned out to nothing.

“Y’all have a good one,” the Bailiff called down. “Tell them chaos creatures I said ‘enjoy.’”

Then he was gone, too.

I swallowed hard and looked at Rali. His breathing hitched and stuttered.

“Kest?” he whispered.

I dropped to my hands and knees and started feeling through the sand around the ladder. What if she’d smashed into the shut-in floor and gotten paralyzed and couldn’t talk? What if we never found her and she died like two feet from us, staring at us and unable to beg for help?

“Kest?” Rali yelled, a ragged edge in his voice. “Please!”

“Up here.” Her voice filtered down from somewhere up on the cliff. “Hang on.”

Pebbles and dirt trickled down. Those thin chains jingled again, and I realized what she’d done. When they’d kicked down the ladder, Kest had shot out her pointed weights from her chain gauntlet. The head had buried itself in the cliff side and stopped her fall.

A few minutes later, she thumped to the ground and let out a whooshing exhale.

“That’s a lot harder than climbing down a ladder,” she said.

She appeared next to us, picking hairpins out of her double buns.

Rali scooped her into a huge hug. “Stop being so emotional. You were fine.”

Kest and I both laughed. I kind of wanted to hug her, too, but that would’ve been weird since she wasn’t my sister.

Also I was shaking a lot. Not just a little tremble in the hands this time, but my whole body was shaking so hard that I sat down in the sandy dirt and flopped onto my back. I laughed until my eyes were watering, then I finally calmed down.

“What now?” I asked, sitting up. “Obviously we don’t want to be in the same place they left us in the morning.”

Kest checked her HUD. “We scavenged this area a lot when we were kids, since it’s so close to town. From here, we need to head east. It’ll start to branch in about a quarter mile.”

“Warcry,” I said, remembering. “Hopefully that jump down didn’t break his neck.”

When I got the redhead out of the storage ring, he dropped onto the dirt and threw up.

I grimaced and handed the ring back to Kest. “Good luck cleaning up the inside.”

“What,” Warcry growled between retches, “the bollix was that?”

“The ride of your life,” Rali said, setting Warcry’s prosthetic on the ground beside him out of reach of the spreading pool of vomit.

Warcry wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “You want a laugh, fat boy, I’ll knock one down your gullet.”

“Rali saved your life, jerkwad!” I snapped. Then I remembered the messages the Bailiff had read. “You got yourself kidnapped on purpose? Are you out of your mind? Do you know how many people are dead because of you?”

“Six OSS, eleven Sword Wardens.” He sat back on his butt and grabbed the prosthetic. The knee joint was dented backward. “And not a one of ’em would give a bleedin’ piss if it was me or you, grav. Ain’t you got any brain at all? You shoulda come with instead of pissin’ all over me plan.”

“How was I supposed to know you were escaping? And what about your script tattoo? They would’ve found you in no time, genius.”

Warcry just shook his head and tried to bend the knee of the prosthetic back the right way over his shin. Something in the fake joint grated.

Kest cringed.

“Give me that!” She snatched the metal leg away from him and started unscrewing bolts. “Trying to force a locked-up joint...”

“Oi, be careful with that!”

Before he was finished yelling at her, she had the whole thing in pieces.

“Kest, do you think that’s the best idea right now?” Rali asked, eyeing the shadows.

I took the hint and stood up, looking for chaos creatures. “Yeah, if we need to make another run for it...”

“He couldn’t run on it before,” Kest muttered. She started going through the components and blowing each one off. A tiny spring fell out of another piece and hit the sand.

Warcry grabbed it. “Don’t lose any of those little bits!”

Kest rolled her eyes. “If I drop something, I can just magnet it back.” She held her hand over the pile. A bunch of cogs and screws and stuff jumped up and clung to the bottom of her palm. “See?”

“Some of them bits ain’t metal, though, are they,” he sneered.

She ignored him. Deep red-orange light shined around her hands, and the air started to heat up. The dented piece of metal she was holding started to glow.

A couple feet away, Rali held his walking stick in both hands like he might have to give someone a beatdown with it.

“So nobody but me and Hake are worried about chaos creatures?” He shifted feet. “That’s great, guys. Because if I was someone else, I’d be concerned that the only flickering shadow I’ve seen so far ducked into that riverbrush over there and hasn’t come back out yet.”

I followed his line of sight to a stand of those wispy trees. From behind me, Kest’s Hot Metal glow flared brighter.

“Just have to reshape...” She let the thought trail off. There was a metallic clunk. “There.”

I thought I saw something hairy twitch at the edge of my vision, but when I turned to look, it had disappeared.

Rali moved up beside me