Death Cultivator 2 by eden Hudson (books to read in your 20s .TXT) 📗

him, “and get off at the next stop, no matter where you were headed.” Then it occurred to me why this guy probably was one of the last passengers we’d seen. “Wait. How many other people on the train did you stick up before me?”

“Six,” he said, in that flat voice.

“How many of them are still alive?”

“None.”

With that many new corpses, the train should’ve been a swimming pool of Miasma, but I hadn’t noticed any. Even if I had missed it, Hungry Ghost should’ve started sucking it down.

“Where are their bodies?” I asked.

The praying mantis’s head rotated smoothly on its axis, and he pointed an arm at the windows. “Defenestrated.”

“Then before you go, you can drop whatever you stole from them, too,” I said, nodding at the floor between us.

The praying mantis pulled a leather messenger bag from over his shoulder and dropped it to the floor with a clank.

“That is everything,” he said.

“Get lost,” I said.

He swayed as he headed for the door at the back of the train car. I didn’t let go of Dead Man’s Hand until the ginormous bug had disappeared through it.

On my way into the bathroom, I grabbed the bag and hooked it over my shoulder.

When I got back to our seats, I set the messenger bag on the table next to the last few bags of uninfused AlgaeFrize. Kest and Warcry stared at the leather bag, but Rali opened his eyes and looked up at me, his black eye-lace shifting from wide to thin and back. It seemed like a weirdly accusatory stare.

I didn’t sit down, just stuck my hands in my pockets. “So I kind of stole this from a dude who stole it from a bunch of other passengers he killed before he tried to steal stuff from me.”

“You did, yeah?” Warcry said like he didn’t believe me. “Where’d you stash this cove’s body?”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said.

“Sure you didn’t, Death cultivator,” the ginger sneered. “But here’s his stuff and here’s you, fine as you like.”

I shifted my weight. “I just told him to drop whatever he’d stolen and get lost.”

“I thought I tasted Miasma,” Rali said in a low voice. “Hake, you...didn’t kill him...did you?”

“No!” I threw up my hands and dropped into my seat. “Geez, I wouldn’t kill a dude for his bag.”

Warcry snorted. “What would you do it for, then, grav?”

“He killed like six people before me,” I said. “If I’d let him get away with all this crap, it would’ve been like he wasn’t getting in trouble at all for what he did.”

That didn’t stop Rali from staring at me some more. He was cool, but we didn’t always agree on stuff related to stealing from the dead, so it wasn’t a big surprise that we didn’t agree on stealing from a murderer.

Kest, on the other hand, was already digging through the bag.

“There’s some great stuff in here,” she said. “Some questionable stuff, too, but the valuables are top-tier.”

She laid out a thin business-card-sized rectangle of pale metal, a handful of Spirit stones, some physical credit coins, a silk fan, and a chunk of meteorite in one pile, then a little cheesecloth bag and a stick of bamboo with the character for LUCK carved into it in another. Between them, she set a glass flask of clear liquid labeled Lost Mirror in another pile.

“I’ve never heard of Lost Mirror elixir,” she said.

“I like the name,” Rali said, tipping the flask back to get a better look. “It’s got all sorts of haunting connotations.”

For a second, it looked like something moved inside the liquid, a flash of purple and white, but when my eyes tried to focus on it, there was nothing there.

“We should get a distiller to identify that before we try to use it,” I said. I had spent most of the past month as an indentured servant for the OSS’s distiller in Ghost Town, and he’d kept all his poisons interspersed with his real and counterfeit elixirs. Even with Ki-sight, you couldn’t tell which was which. Only another distiller would be able to figure it out.

“Wouldn’t open that on the train, neither.” Warcry tapped the silk fan. “It’s got a Wind Spirit construct on it. Probably something that blasts enemies back.”

Kest picked up the metal business card and turned it over, studying both sides.

“I would’ve thought you’d be more interested in the star iron, Kest,” Rali said.

“Star iron is everywhere.” She squinted at the card. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen platinum in person. It has some sort of information on it, but it’s not a book. It looks like...”

She frowned, then put the card up to her mouth and breathed on it. Thin script appeared etched in the metal surface, then disappeared as the condensation from her breath evaporated.

“What did it say?” I asked, leaning in.

“What I thought—‘Money in the bank,’” she said. “It’s a favor card. Probably from somebody powerful if it’s platinum.”

Rali’s eyebrows jumped up. “That mantis killed somebody with seriously high connections. Maybe they were on their way to retrieve a favor from the owner. Or maybe they got the card in exchange for taking the fall for a higher-up off planet, and they were going to retrieve it once they’d paid the sentence for him.”

I couldn’t help grinning. “What, is that just like an old sword legend you read?”

“No, it’s like the gangster dramas,” he said. “Not as good, but still entertaining.”

“And total nonsense,” Kest said.

Rali chuckled. “Yeah, total nonsense, but it’s still fun to see what the Confederated planets think gangs are like. Personally, I think the Big Five has them written as propaganda to romanticize themselves, sort of like recruiting tools.”

The train lurched. I grabbed the edge of the table to brace myself. The elixir flask slid off the corner of the table and smashed on the floor. A wisp of purple shimmered in the air before evaporating into nothingness.

“Guess we don’t have to worry about what was inside it,” I said, raising my voice