Grist to the Cannon: Intro Chapter
Phineas is only kind of disappointed the guy’s got the wreck handled by the time she gets close enough to talk with him. Staring at the still forever-away radio tower jutting up into the horizon had gotten boring like an hour ago, so the mystery of this new shape shimmering through the heat mirages had done a lot to break the monotony. Even more once she’d caught movement and realized it wasn’t just a pile of corpses.
The desert doesn’t offer many hiding places so the driver had seen her coming a while ago, he’d stopped to rest on the back of the wagon after getting it set up again and decided to wait for her. When she gets within socializing distance he wipes sweat from the grooves in his face with a gross scrap of fabric that might have been a potholder in another life. He’s wearing overalls and big old boots, tinted driving goggles and a patterned bandanna around his neck, but Phineas could tell he was a working man from a distance. Long, faded spines of hardy reliability make straight and spartan lines in the air around him; she only ever sees lines like that in halos from the kinds of people who naturally produce packed dirt under their fingernails. This dude isn’t the kind of reliability she’s looking for, there isn’t enough color to it, but she’s glad he’d let her catch up.
The old man with the big eyebrows and the faded halo spits in the dirt sociably and nods at her.
“Hey,” Phineas says, stopping in the middle of the road and jamming her hands in her coat pockets. Soft shuffling and chittering is coming from the other side of the wagon, a pair of beasts Phineas can’t quite suss out.
“You walk here, girl?” the driver asks. He has one of those thready, callused voices that has to fight its way out, the same texture as yellowed plastic. Hearing his, Phineas relaxes into her own accent more than normal.
“Nah, I was in a truck for a while but the driver didn’t wanna come this far.” Phineas had never been in a real car before and she still hasn’t, really. Manufactured vehicles and their fuels are hard to get in the fringier places like where she’d grown up, but there’s always enough junk lying around to cobble together something that could get you and yours down the road. Long as you found a critter strong enough to pull it. She’d been excited about the novelty, but decided to stay outside in the bed of the truck rather than make the cagey driver share the cab with her. He’d gone real squirrely once he saw her up close.
Taking a minute to think about trucks lulls the conversation, which Phineas generally tries to avoid since it gives people time to notice something about her makes them feel nervous. Hoping for inspiration, Phineas looks around at the landscape she’s already been looking around at for several days, leans back on her heels and feels past the cracked concrete under her bare feet. The desert is the exact same dry and empty it was last time she looked. The disappointment anchors her to her body, she makes her shoulders shrug and offers something mundane to fill the silence.
“There ain’t even a road that comes this way, I was surprised when this one just showed up after ‘while. Like it fell out of the sky or somethin’.”
“Yeah,” the man says, deeply uninterested in discussing civil engineering. His name is Larimer, but Phineas never learns that because she forgets to ask. “Don’t get a lot of travelers out this way.”
Phineas has seen the expression he’s leveling at her before, it’s the way people watch an unfamiliar dog without a collar.
“Mm, today’s sucked,” she states, still trying for ease. “Y’all don’t make it easy to find you.”
“What’s here to find?” He’s working something out, old but dependable gears are turning behind his eyes. “You ain’t even got a pack or nothin’? Water?”
“I got big pockets,” Phineas says, spreading her arms to drag out her coat like wings around her. It’s soft, worn canvas that drapes more than such sturdy fabric ought to, the sunset gradient a cheerful glare even against the oranges and reds already smothering the landscape. Ashy brown stripes border the hems, and across her back in a matching color are two concentric circles, like a target. It’s too big for her.
“I’m fine,” she insists.
“Hng,” Larimer says, abject derision in the universally understood Old Man Dialect. “Picked a hot as hell day to go for a fuckin’ walk.”
He’s not wrong. Phineas’ heels would be sizzling on the asphalt if they were anyone else’s.
“Uh-huh.” She shoves her hand through her short, sweaty hair, grabs at the ends and hangs there. Her toothy smile is genuine. “Can I see the critters?”
“The armadillos?”
“Oh neat!” Armadillos! “Can I see ’em?”
Larimer looks like that’s a weird thing to ask, but he nods and jerks his head in that direction instead of pointing, still staring hard at her from under his bushy eyebrows.
Careful to leave plenty of space between the two of them, Phineas picks her way in a wide circle towards the other end of the wagon. Larimer is a grumpy, dusty man whose face had probably cemented into that mean expression years ago, but Phineas had been able to feel the neon jab of his anxiety way before she got close enough to talk. She’s had time to notice that the top-heavy stone formations around them don’t tend to feel any particular way about anything; the only other sapient soul out here lighting up with fear had looked like a signal flare. Phineas needs a ride, she doesn’t want to risk spooking him.
Or the armadillos! There are two of them, calm in their harnesses and apparently unscathed after whatever brought the wagon down. They’re a little taller than Phineas and they smell like the farm down the road from Jo’s house, which is kind of upsetting, so she pets her hand over an enormous scaly flank and gets absorbed in their texture instead. The huge emerald scales are smooth and marbley, hot under the relentless sun, but they shift like skin at her touch and she can feel the animal’s heartbeat faintly through them. Phineas reaches up to see what the fur on their heads is like and giggles when the thing snorts at her, twitches one ear in a sleepy arc.
The wheel axles groan as Larimer hauls himself to his feet and ambles around the side to join her in the shade cast by the dusty canvas. Phineas can see him better without the sunshine in her eyes and realizes one of the deep wrinkles on his face is actually a fresh cut, right where his goggles might sit, and she notices now one of those dark lenses is cracked. There’s blood staining the bandanna around his neck, the red hiding in the dark checks of the fabric is more visible here out of the light.
“What happened?” Phineas asks, dragging a finger across her own face to match the gash. “You fall asleep at the…” A quick glance back at the wagon that doesn’t help at all. “The. Wheel?”
“Got robbed,” Larimer says, his eye on her made more aggressive by his bushy eyebrows. He hesitates, then, “Coupl’a days ago, a ways back from here. The axle ain’t been right since, I gotta keep stoppin’ to fix it like I just did. It’s been slow gettin’ home. Ain’t got nothin’ left worth takin’ now, at least.”
Getting an accusation gives her the go-ahead to start reassuring him out loud. Phineas turns fully towards him, hands up. Those huge eyebrows furrow even more, probably at the circles burned into the palms of her leather gloves, mirrors of the sloppier ones tattooed on the skin underneath. They match the ones on her back. She shifts her weight to feel the road grit under her feet.
“I’m not here to make trouble,” Phineas says, in her nicest, most-practiced least-commander-y voice. “I just wanted to ask if I could hitch a ride, if you’re goin’ that way.” She points at the tower without moving her arms.
“What do you need that way?” Larimer asks reasonably. He’s calmer now, that flare of nerves smoothed over, so Phineas relaxes and puts her hands back in her coat pockets.
“A starship.” She can’t help smiling when she says it. She wiggles her toes. “Gettin’ tired of walkin’.”
He squints at her and finally that old as hell processor between his ears cranks out a punch card.
“Commander, ain’t it? Y’all don’t wear shoes.” Phineas nods, holding his gaze.
“Is that okay?”
Phineas doesn’t think of herself as manipulative. She doesn’t have the head for that sort of thing. But she does like to get what she wants, and she’s come to understand some stuff about other people after being Phineas Kidd for most of her life. From Larimer’s perspective, inherent commander creepiness or not, she’s an unarmed, small person in the desert carrying nothing but a glorified bed sheet on her back. She’s an adult for sure, but still young enough that people like this tend to pity her if they don’t pay attention to the battered skin across her knuckles or know what those circles on her hands mean. People also think she’s a woman, which usually drives all those sympathy meters further along in out of the way places like this. Being underestimated is good, most of the time, and right now she hopes it will get her on this wagon and down this road.
She lets herself radiate only a touch of commander’s charisma while she waits for an answer, just a nudge. Sleeping out here would be miserable.
In the air around him, in some colors Phineas never fooled with naming, those spartan lines are getting a little bit less faded, hanging a little bit straighter in the air. Larimer is a decent man. Phineas wonders if he might have a grandson with hair like hers, maybe his wife’s hair is the same shade of blushy pink.
“Well,” he drawls. “there ain’t a gun in my face, not a real one leastways. Still better than I was doing earlier.” He moves to climb into the drivers’ seat. “Get in the back if you want, it ain’t comfortable but it’s better than walkin’ around out here without any goddamned shoes on.”
The jolt almost loses them a wagon wheel, and it does pitch Phineas out of her nap and onto the floor. She snorts against the splintery planks; her sweaty face has picked up a layer of dust to match the rest of everything while she’s been out. There’s no other cargo back here with her and Larimer hadn’t bothered to resecure the storage equipment, the wheels are catching every irregularity in the road to send doors and straps and chains banging themselves to pieces.
“Quit tearin’ around back there!” Larimer hollers over the clattering of wood and rolling armadillos pounding the dirt. Those big scales are whipping up a dust cloud around them, spilling under the wagon’s cover and peppering her unprotected skin, and Phineas checks “wagon” off of the list of potential shapes she’ll have her ship’s heart take.
Awake enough now she can stumble to standing, she loosens up to move complementary with the shapes around her, finds her grounding to bridge the short distance between the earth and the wagon. When they’re really good, commanders can keep their balance through anything. Phineas is pretty good, and that’s enough that her feet stay steady on the floor while she sways to the back of the canvas cover to look outside.
First, she notices the road is a black strip rapidly receding into the horizon line, framed by the billowing dust flaring out behind them. That thump had been them falling down hard off the desiccated asphalt and onto harder dirt. Huge, dark shapes litter the ground in an oddly regular line parallel to their direction, like holes in the desert floor. That mystery is boring, because:
Second, it got dark while she slept; the sun is still working on setting in the direction they’re heading, bleeding frenzied warm colors into the cooling purple of the night eating up the remains of the road. In the imperious desert sky Phineas can see the first few stars peeking out, but there’s something else. One of the rock formations growing from the landscape looks…different.
She watches it for a long moment, mesmerized, and then it moves. Abject joy flies from her throat in an ugly bark of laughter, yellow sparks light up the darkening space she’s balanced in, latching onto debris in the whirling dust and bouncing them back the way they’d come. She turns on her heel and lilts to the front of the wagon.
“Hey, hey!” Phineas is breathless as she grabs for the wooden rib that makes the opening to the driver’s seat, leaning way out to get a better view of the enormous thing cutting a dark shape against the sunset. Larimer jerks the reins when he startles, the armadillos dutifully obeying the sharp tug and nearly tipping them. This old, weathered wood conducts energy as good as anything, and there’s plenty of momentum to redirect. As soon as they leave the ground Phineas commands the wheels back down before she thinks to stifle the reflex.
“Hell’s bells!” Larimer spits from under his bandanna. He eases them back on course and Phineas lets him without any more interference, he could probably use a win today. He snaps his head around to look back at her so she can see her face in his goggles, squinting in the wind. “What?!”
“What’s that thing out there!” Phineas demands over the din, pointing back over his shoulder. Larimer looks.
“Oh, that’s Careful Pete.” His speech is muffled, she leans in to hear it better.
“What’s a Careful Pete!”
“You never seen a turtle before?”
Feeling that tugged-leash feeling she gets when boring people are boring, Phineas fights the urge to roll her eyes with her whole body at the person sparing her from camping in the desert.
Careful Pete is a turtle, that’s become obvious with the new context. Maybe a tortoise, Phineas can never remember the differences. It’s difficult to get a grip on his exact size or even how far away he is, but Phineas had initially mistaken him for one of the far-off mesas dotting the landscape, and the shadow and silhouette are so wildly strange she feels giddy with it. She realizes now, as he takes another slow, unfathomable step towards the same tower they’re approaching, that instead of a shell his back is covered in tropical trees. The dark spots she’d seen scattered alongside the road aren’t boulders like she’d assumed, they’re palm fronds.
Careful Pete is a patron saint; she can feel the distinct shape of his spirit, ancient and heavy with faith and obligation. Patron saints are as varied as the different places they guard, but Phineas can always tell she’s looking at one by the sense of duty they’re born with, a tie to the land that makes them better for learning about the environment than any guide if you know how to ask.
Phineas blocks out the cacophony around her and reaches for him to get a better look. Her own spirit thrums unseen and greedy along the desert floor, sailing through all the spaces between the grit where the sunshine gets caught, but it turns out he’s further out than she thought. Too far to touch.
Sulking a bit she reels herself back, but then: a spark, a battery on her tongue that tastes like hot leaves. Blocking the side of her face with her free hand and squinting against the wind, she can just make out a visage that might have been hewn from the same stones carving the sky around it. Then, the crescent-moon-white of an eye bigger than the wagon she’s standing in.
The patron saint of this desert is watching her. She lights up with the feeling of endless wandering, displacement, determined longing. The feeling of nothing and no one around for miles and miles and miles,
– except, innumerable veins writhing with life like eels in a river, a throbbing pulse rushing to some unspeakable buried heart in the center of this place –
the red earth and the bleeding sky.
Phineas laughs for real this time; the match that starts the fire in a house that begs for it, joyous and terrible light.
It’s the first time she’s done it properly today, longer if she’s being honest, and she loves how it spirals out in the air as a searing orange, dragging sunlight all the way up from her heart. Larimer can’t see it, of course, but it doesn’t take any sort of affinity to feel a commander’s soul lighting up the room, and his answering shudder brings her down enough to put it away again. She wants the hell off this wagon so bad she itches with it, all her muscles twitching and jumping to run. Away from this desert and its flinching faces, further away from the ones who flinched at the last place she passed through and even further away from the ones at home who flinched first. There have to be people she can laugh with somewhere, she’s gotta be getting close to finding them. For now, Phineas gets the lid on quick.
“He’s harmless,” Larimer says when she’s quiet for too long. He’s misconstrued all of it as nervousness and is gruffly trying to reassure her, she wants to tear her hair out. “He just circles the town usually, dunno what he’s doin’. Folks tend to say he’s lookin’ for happiness.”
“Happiness?” She tries.
“Yeah,” Larimer says unhelpfully, tugging the reins and smoothly adjusting their course. He doesn’t seem to see a point in elaborating. “Used to be lot’s’a bigguns like him out here, probably. He’s all that’s left, exiled in his own home these days.”
Phineas leans her head against the wagon rib to watch as Pete turns away from her, focused again on his trek.
“What happened?” She asks distantly, before dialing back into the wagon properly. “To the others? It’s weird for saints to disappear like that.”
“Don’t know from no saints, I just drive the cart.”
Extremely done with this mundane man, Phineas ducks back inside and looks out the other opening towards the setting sun instead, the warmth stirring restless impatience in her chest.
In front of them, smaller structures are rising up against the sun as it melts into the dimming earth. They coalesce into a meager skyline, but the tower is only getting taller and darker as it rises above everything else. Almost, almost.
Larimer won’t take her all the way into the town, but he drops her off a lot closer than where they’d started and that’s pretty good.
“This is as far as I go, I’ve had a real shit day,” he grumbles, not stepping down from his perch in the driver’s seat to see her off. Phineas is petting the armadillos again. “If I go downtown tonight I’m just gonna run up my tab at Sergei’s, my wife’ll be pissed.”
“Downtown” must be the wide, empty gap Phineas can see between a row of larger buildings. That feeling of home, again, too much nothing taking up too much space. She nods at him to clear her head, smiles big and honest.
“Thanks a lot dude, you really helped me out.”
Larimer clears his throat, his discomfort visible even with his expression hidden behind the driving gear. God, even a smile is too much. Phineas is going to suffocate soon.
“Hope you find what you’re lookin’ for, I guess.”
He looks like he might say something else, but thinks better of it and turns forward in his seat. Phineas takes a few steps backwards and Larimer snaps the reins harmlessly against the armored animals. They curl into lopsided, uncanny spheres, skid through the dry dirt long enough to find traction, then they’re off like gunshots, the empty wagon banging over the terrain as violently as ever. Phineas watches it tear away towards a row of identical ramshackle buildings poking miserably out from the landscape. From this distance, Phineas can see some lit windows scattered across them, maybe residential buildings of some kind. The majority of them are dark.
For the first time, Phineas wonders if something is amiss. From the way Jo talked there ought to be a city here, a real one, not a pile of dried-out lean-tos. She doesn’t have time to ruminate on it; when she turns back to face the tower and the rest of the town wrapped around the base, she has company.
The desert hare on the left is wearing a ruined straw hat, the top punched out to make room for tall fluffy ears, and the hare on the right is missing one tall fluffy ear entirely. The whole left side of his face looks like it’s been mashed in by something blunt. They’re both staring right back at her a lot more intensely than animals ought to, so Phineas plants her feet and nods respectfully to the second and third saints she’s met today.
“Evenin’,” she says. The one missing an ear thumps forward slowly, she kneels down to put them at eye level.
“There’s a target on your back.” The voice is like glass in a garbage disposal.
“Huh?” Phineas almost tries to look at her own back. “Oh, do you mean my coat? It’s not a target, it’s an-”
“Don’t,” it rasps. “Don’t talk about that in here, things are listening.” It tilts its head unnaturally, even for a hare, bending its neck alarmingly until the stump of its bad ear is parallel to the ground.
“Something for you.” The glass grinds. “Take it.”
Phineas hesitates.
“From…in your ear?”
The hare nods, sideways. Phineas glances up at the other one, its eyes are completely hidden under the sun-dried straw. It’s taller and thinner than its brother twisted up in front of her, the proportions unsettling. It doesn’t speak, but it folds its arms like a humankind, bent wrong at the elbows. Phineas could probably fight these things, but it seems like bad luck to spar with a saint so soon after getting to a new place.
The thing that’s really getting Phineas’ hackles up is that they don’t have any discernible spirits, no halos or anything, which means they’re hiding. It’s technically possible all rabbits just do that no matter who they are, Phineas hasn’t met very many, but patron saints hiding in their own territory probably isn’t a good sign.
…But if they’re hiding from something, and cared enough to shush her up before she caught its attention, they might be handing her something useful. So, Phineas carefully brushes her fingers through the thick fur spilling out of the hare’s ear. It’s wiry and shedding sun-warm dirt into the crevices of the hand wrap under her glove as she searches, and she tries not to think about how she shouldn’t be able to reach so far in. She’s up to her elbow in fur when something pricks her finger. The hare shudders.
“Pull,” it says. “Quick.”
She does. Something thin and blue and hard comes free with little resistance, and it isn’t very substantial on its own, but it keeps coming free from the hare’s head long enough to make Phineas’ stomach turn over. As soon as it’s out, the hare shakes itself vigorously in the most animalistic gesture either of the saints have made so far, reaching up with one large foot to scratch at the base of the ear Phineas has just excavated.
The Item is shaped almost like an antler. Cornflower blue and pocked with holes, it’s about the size of a fountain pen but sits heavy in her hand. Despite the holes Phineas can’t see through to the other side, the dark inside it is opaque.
“Wh…uh, what do you want me to -“
“We feel sorry for you,” the hare cuts her off. “If you get far along enough to use this, we’ll be listening.”
“I still don’t-“
“You be good, okay?”
“Hey-“ Phineas looks up from where she’d been transfixed on the mystery object, but it’s to the sound of them bounding away into the empty desert. The sun is only a sliver sliced above the town now, the brightening moonlight is threatening to spill everywhere like ice water. Phineas realizes, watching the odd shapes disappear into the expanse, that it’s going to be freezing during the night here. The desert fucking sucks.
Nothing for it now. She tucks the antler away in her coat pocket where it promptly slips from this plane of existence. Phineas slides her hands over the dark stripes that border the lapels of her coat, up around her neck, until the fabric shifts and extends along with her touch. Straightening her back, she pulls the newly formed hood over her head.
The tower against the setting sun casts a long, long shadow that runs all the way out of town and threatens to swallow her even here near the edge of it. The sun makes a long, long shadow behind Phineas too, but in hers, a pair of searing circles hovers between the funhouse-shape of her shoulders. It blinks, once, and Phineas smiles to nobody but herself.
Several provinces away, a very old rooster woman is running up her tab.
“Roosters don’t crow,” she slurs at her drinking partner, who is neither drinking nor her partner. “In the morning. Not at the sun like people think, crowin’s for good things.”
“Sure,” the man says, trying to catch the barman’s attention to get the check.
“I got nothin’ good to say to that motherfucker.” Jocasta slugs the rest of her well whiskey. “Roosters used to run this place, you know what I mean? You know.”
“Garçon,”
“Their land, their things, and it rolls in and takes every scrap.” She meets the man’s eyes and even through the glaze of alcohol the screwturn of her years bolts him in place. “Rooster screams herself hoarse ’cause that’s all she can do, but it’s not fuckin’ crowing. Crow is for good things.”
The man swallows.
“H-her? The rooster is female?”
He feels a year of his life burn away under her contempt.