The Weather Watcher

Tomas blew into Clarity’s law office, rattling the dry-rotted shutters like a ramping dust storm. He had just found another kid’s dead body on the flats.
“Olin,” he bellowed, ignoring the handful of hungover deputies he shocked awake. One fell off her chair. Another continued snoring, cradling his head against his desk.
Sheriff Olin Helk didn’t glance up from his paper at the back of the shabby office, lit by unwashed windows that had long since lost their transparency.
“Olin.” Tomas wove around desks and chairs chewed by rusk rats.
“I heard you the first time, Tom.” Olin flipped a page in his newspaper.
“Why the hell didn’t you answer?”
“Was I supposed to answer? I know my name. You like attention; you got it from my deputies.”
Tomas dug the crumpled WANTED poster out of his duster and slammed it down in front of Olin. “What is this?”
“Wonderful artistry, considering the rush job.” Olin leaned back and raised the newspaper to hide his face. “Better than The Night Butcher poster, don’t you think?”
A hulking mass of muscle and spiky fur glared from the dark illustration, topped with dripping red letters: The Terror of the Flats.
“This’ll get folks killed, Ol. I told you to handle it.”
“Protection of Clarity is a shared responsibility, Tom. You’re offense. I’m defense. Defense requires able-bodied allies.” The man had the stones to sigh.
Tomas squeezed his fists; they’d feel better swinging at the sheriff’s jaw. His middle finger broke through the tip of his worn glove. “I can’t protect the whole damn province.”
“And whose fault is it you don’t have a partner?”
“If I’m havin’ trouble catching this rusk wolf, how the hell are normal folk to do it?”
“I didn’t conscript farmers. This poster will draw Headhunters.”
“Two bars of Greenmetal would draw sugar flies to salt! Clarity can’t afford that.”
Olin crossed his feet on his desk. “If you were better at your job, it wouldn’t have come to this.” He turned another page, studying that infernal paper.
Mud-wallowing silt-hog. The room darkened, clouds rumbling for action. Seeking attention, was he? Fine.
Tomas snatched the rifle off his back, aimed, and shot the round wood carving hanging behind Olin’s desk: the shield of Emperia’s Law Enforcement Core. “You took oaths. Cowards hide behind others.”
The deputies pretended to be useful, halfheartedly cocking pistols in his direction. They knew he could blow them through the windows with a click of his teeth. He flexed his hands until his gloves creaked.
“Enough.” Olin lowered his paper and nodded to a bulky deputy. “Jones, take them to the brothel or something.”
The deputies were out the door before he finished speaking.
Olin folded the newspaper, sneering at the bullet hole in his wooden shield. Muddy hair curled out from a hat just like Tomas’s—brim dipping in front, sides raised—only Olin’s was crisp and well-oiled.
“You could send those meatheads after the wolf.”
Olin’s mustache twitched. “Jones can’t track his last meal, much less a predator.”
“Not my fault you like being the only brain in the room.”
“I could have your gun license for pulling a rifle on me.”
Tomas snorted. Olin flung that threat around any time he got pissed.
“Lower that antique, Tom.”
The humidity pressed against Tomas’s coat. “Afraid I’ll use it?”
“Shooting skinhares and wall decor don’t count.” Olin sucked his teeth and stood. “You know what? I’m tired of your shit. Hand over that rifle. Now.”
#
For once, it wasn’t an empty threat. Olin might be a prick, but as a handler, he was usually all words. He must be right pissed.
Tomas’s eye glared up at him from the surface of his whiskey. The saloon’s fuchsia light brightened rusted wagon wheel tables and oak stools, flashing from a sign spelling Paradise. Gus stood behind the battered bar, but no amount of liquor made that man pleasant company.
“What’s the strongest drink I can buy for seven grams of Red?” A woman with far too many silver hairs to match her smooth, tawny skin leaned over the counter. Worn, grit-caked clothes; rifle sorely needing maintenance, clay crusting the crevices.
Gus swiped the dry counter with a rag. “Seven grams of Red won’t get you much beyond a shot of grain.”
Hogwash. Seven grams of Red could get folks a few shots of grain. Tomas pressed his front teeth together and stared into his whiskey.
The woman sighed and glanced at Tomas. Gripping her rifle’s shoulder strap, she edged down the bar a step. Only crazies walked around unarmed—the harmless and the kind that kept company with The Night Butcher. Tomas did not look harmless.
The woman pulled a long bar of Redmetal from her satchel and, as if cutting a stick of butter, flicked her pocket knife to shave off just enough.
At the sight of an entire bar, Gus’s eyes widened. Lady was rich or careless.
The patrons didn’t turn toward the Metal on the counter. A couple shared a meal of beans and rusk rabbit under neon-lit pine trees. A slouching man in tanned leather cleaned his hunting knife while a woman and son studied their map.
They all saw it, though.
“You sure I can’t get you some water?” Gus asked. “I could fill your canteen. Awfully dry out there during Flash season. Only charge thirty grams of Green.” That was robbery, even for the greedy bastard. He was aiming to barter for a nice chunk of that Red.
Tomas swallowed a growl.
The woman pursed her lips. Metal and Might, she was considering it!
He squeezed his glass. It wasn’t his business. But as the woman reached for her canteen, his arm moved on its own, staying her hand.
“Allow me.” He pulled off his gloves and took the canteen, skin tingling as moisture built with the approaching storm. He pressed the Bluemetal caps of his molars together, and a shock charged from his teeth down his spine as he closed the circuit of energy running through his body.
His fingertips fizzed; the tin-plated canteen grew heavier.
He gave it back to her and tipped his wide-brimmed hat. “Condensed moisture ain’t the best flavor, but at least it’s free. Dusty aftertaste’s not so bad.”
Gus narrowed his eyes and had the gall to pull Tomas’s half-empty whiskey to his side of the bar. Tomas slid it back. The cheat would probably dilute his liquor with cactus juice now.
The woman accepted her canteen, eyes widening. This could go one of two ways.
Time to leave. Barring his horrible day, losing his rifle meant a sabbatical. He shoved his stool back and threw a pre-cut Redmetal chunk on the counter that would more than pay for his drink.
“Wait.” Fear didn’t shape her mouth’s grim line; it was shaped from need. She scanned his long leather coat—cracking near his calves—and traced the bandanna and goggles hanging from his neck. His lack of a rifle must have confirmed his profession.
After transforming humidity into drinkable water, it wasn’t something he could deny either.
Her rigid posture melted, alcohol forgotten on the counter as she gripped the edge of the bar. “Please. It’s my daughter, Norah. She’s not back.”
Tomas swallowed; not another kid. “You report it to the sheriff?”
That wavering lip of hers said ‘yes’ before she did. It must have happened just after he had stormed out earlier.
“Please,” the mother repeated. “She’s only fifteen.”
He glared at Olin’s Terror of the Flats fliers plastered behind the counter, overlapping old WANTED posters of the shadowy Night Butcher.
Tomas shook his empty glass at Gus. Couldn’t even last a few hours on sabbatical. “Where did the girl go missing?”
#
The clay flats. Arid and unforgiving, brittle as a tumbleweed and just as verdant. Unapologetic and unabashedly itself. A man could lose himself real quick out here. It didn’t give a shit what someone did or didn’t do.
Tomas breathed in the crackling spice of an approaching storm—one that would hit fast and pass before rain could wet the ground. The gray sky was still a shade lighter than pewter; Flash season was frightfully unpredictable to the sensible folk of Emperia’s dry region. The corners of Tomas’s lips curled up.
An unnatural scent hid in the galvanized air—floral, soft. No flowers grew here; it matched the handkerchief Norah’s mother had given him. The girl must be nearby, but he still hadn’t caught a whiff of blood.
Perhaps she was still alive.
A foolish thought. He tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket beside the Redmetal bar payment. She had tried to give him three bars, but that was too much for a corpse retrieval.
He should have told her there was no hope. That she didn’t want to see what became of her little girl. Parents always said not knowing was worse until they held the gnawed bones of their children. Until they screamed their throats raw, cursing him for being too late.
The discarded doll from this morning, a pattern of red staining its tiny dress…
Tremors crawled up his arm, and he squeezed his hand into a fist, empty with no barrel to cradle, no safety to release. Seeing the beast dead would at least give him some peace and his license back.
Weather Watchers often worked in pairs, but that established dominance more than shared a burden. Working alone meant he didn’t have to trust gold-toothed smiles and greasy laughs.
Tomas stooped above faint tracks weaving between a group of rusted vehicle carcasses—a metal boneyard from a time long past. As the wind kicked up, he hunkered against one brittle skeleton, the outer shell torn off by scavengers. He raised the bandana over his nose and focused on the mountains stabbing through steely clouds.
More footprints led the way as he broke into a jog, boots pounding dust. The floral scent grew stronger as the peaks ahead grew larger, yet the distance seemed to lengthen. A wail warbled across the cracked ground. Or was that his imagination?
His molars tingled; electricity peppered the wind. Unfortunately, the twisting clouds said the center of the storm would kiss the flats before churning over the Forbidden Mountains. He might catch a few wisps of lightning before they devolved into outlying cyclones. Lightning would be far more effective on the matriarch.
A gale rammed him against another gutted vehicle, ripping his handkerchief clean off his face. Tomas smiled with his full mouth, heedless of the grit filling gaps between his teeth like mortar. He tugged on his thick-rimmed goggles as the rising winds luffed his leather duster against his calves.
The skies moaned; a chill thrilled his spine as he sprang away from the metal bones. Molars clenched, he activated his Bluemetal and directed the debris to avoid him, encouraging the moisture beading his lenses to evaporate.
Despite his best efforts to stay realistic, hope spasmed when a second wail sounded. Human?
Shadows shifted below the cliff ahead, but this close to the Forbidden Mountains, it was hard to decipher. The Mist leaked down towering peaks and poured onto the flats—glimmering with golden flecks like pyrite. Some folks thought malevolent spirits formed the Mist, while others argued Quarrell roamed free, using it to conceal their passage.
Ghosts and mischievous rock golems were things superstitious folk worried about. Rusk wolves were far more real and far more dangerous. They were keen on dens built into the craggy cliffs, where limestone met clay.
A ribbon of sweet decay wove through the blustering wind—a memory or a fear? Silver light gilded the tumult of clouds. Any moment now…
Panting huffed behind him, accompanied by a growl. As the sky pitched like waves overhead, wind raging and pressing against his body, Tomas looked over his shoulder.
A pair of green eyes cut through the swirling dust, spiked fur prickling up a hulking spine. Rusk wolf. It must have been sheltering in a vehicle, avoiding his detection. It wasn’t the devilish mother; this one loped with the easy gait of an adolescent, still losing youthful specks on its coat.
He turned back to the cliff; there was no time. Everything played second to the matriarch. Fast as he sped, the clouds moved faster, taking their charged energy with them. A yelp cracked against the foot of the mountain, followed by a warmer cry.
The storm was lifting too early. He wouldn’t make it to the den before lightning was no longer an option. From behind, the adolescent wolf was gaining on him.
Thunder rumbled, echoing in his veins, as he clamped his molars. The charge of Bluemetal surged through his body; he stretched an arm above his head as the wind carried him off the ground. He spun in the air, summoning the electrified heavens into the palm of his hand. Heat branched down his forearm and through his bones, where bolts of Blue vibrated with raw, wild energy.
Nothing beat holding a fistful of lightning—crackling with lawless light and sheer force. Tomas inhaled, freezing for one terrifying moment. The only moments he was in control. Neon brilliance sizzled against his skin.
Breath hissing out through his teeth, lightning shot from his hand.
Tomas was empty. All thought, all pain and passion: absent. He was a shell. When he opened his eyes, there was little left aside from a mound of smoking fur. But in his mind, a tiny hand stretched across a puddle in the silt, reaching for a button-eyed doll.
The cliff was close, but so were the Mists, spilling in plumes, obscuring the base from view. As he pushed into the glittering fog, grunts melded with mutters, vapor licking in gentle circles around his head. He waved away phantoms, squinting to find a cave mouth ahead.
Something crunched to his right; Tomas raised his arm. He couldn’t use the Mist—it never obeyed weather, continuing its creep as if the whipping wind didn’t exist. That whipping wind could serve him, though.
“Norah?”
The fog thinned, revealing two silhouettes. A girl crouched at the cave’s mouth. Moving. Struggling.
Norah was alive.
Dust caked inside his throat. For once in his miserable life, he had made it in time.
The girl’s silhouette wrestled with a shaggy outline far larger than the mutt he had just smoked. Tomas clamped his teeth so hard he bit the inside of his cheek. Hands cupped like throwing clay on a potter’s wheel, he molded twin tornadoes. He pulled the girl back with one whirlwind while restraining the wolf with the other.
Norah gave a soft cry, but he focused on the Matriarch. No escape this time; no more tiny bones, no more grieving parents.
The Matriarch didn’t put up a fight as he hoisted it into the cave, limp as a wet rug. Perhaps the beast thought it would help to play dead. Time to deal with her equally brutal wolf pack inside. He released the winds protecting Norah.
A copper tang hit his tongue when he stepped into the cave, and it wasn’t coming from the cut in his mouth. Several lumps of matted fur littered the slick ground. Red veined the Matriarch’s whirlwind. Tomas recoiled, dropping the matriarch’s half-skinned carcass beside the others.
A rifle cocked.
The girl stood at the cave mouth, rifle aimed at Tomas, blood creeping down her forehead. Her skin was a few shades darker than her mother’s—as smooth and warm as raw tiger’s eye—but the likeness between them was uncanny.
“Who are you?” The edge to her voice matched the sharp line of her jaw and taut trigger finger.
Tomas leaned against the wall, lingering relief battling quiet disappointment. She was safe, after all.
“You’re not here for the pelt, are you?” she asked.
That damn reward poster.
She had been struggling to skin the beast, not fight it. “Your mother’s worried. I came looking for you.”
“What’s her name?” Norah didn’t lower her weapon.
Tomas fished out the handkerchief. “She said you were paying respects to her father.” Though that had clearly been a lie.
She eyed the cloth. “Her name?”
This kid was in danger of winning his respect. “Myrah? Marie? You live in the village, Silt—your father’s overseas. Inquisition over?”
Norah slung the gun on her back and waved a bloody knife at the wolf. “I assume she paid you. Since I don’t need saving, you can help.”
Not what he expected, but skinning someone else’s kill was better than finding the girl dead. “Not a bad job, kid.”
“Not a kid.” She glanced over her shoulder, studying his empty back. “Need a gun? I freelance. What’s your name?”
“Tomas.”
“Toe Maahs? You hiring?”
“Your mother know about that?”
Her chin jutted out. “I don’t need her permission.”
“You as loose with Metal as her?”
“You think I’d be out here if I was?” She frowned, knife pausing. “She didn’t give you Red bars, did she? That’s all we have.”
“Only took one.”
“How charitable. Since you did nothing, give it back.”
“I’ll give a quarter of it back.”
“Half.”
Tomas chuckled; a rare, rasping vibration. “How old are you again?”
“Old enough to point, shoot, and take out the Terror of the Flats. I won’t hold you back. Far more responsible than most sorry excuses for adults.”
How long had it been since he had felt that fire in his belly? “You make this offer to every stranger you run across?”
Her eyes fell on his bare hands. “You’re the only Weather Watcher I’ve ever met.”
“And that doesn’t scare you?”
“How can I fear something I want to become?”
Tomas inhaled, keeping his face flat. The surprises kept coming today. How was he supposed to respond to that? “I’ll give it some thought. Let’s get this skin back to the sheriff.”