((J. Dac says: Now you all have the privilege of seeing why I write prose and not poetry.))
Relief washed over me in waves. I was afraid, at first, that she would be resistant to the end, and she would call my bluff on stopping her heart. My poker face prevailed, and now I had a final, definitive shard of hope to which to cling.
Though the prison had only lent me the remote to Hoshiya's mechanical heart temporarily because I would be attending to her directly, I stuck it in my pocket. For the time being, I had no plans of returning the device, and I was fairly confident I wouldn't be employed by the prison for very long. After all, in order to use Hoshiya as a translator for the map, I would need to break her out of the prison, and I was pretty sure the prison wouldn't look too highly on one of their employees who helped an inmate escape.
I crafted the escape plan quickly, after confirming the existence of the map by having Hoshiya show it to me. (Apparently she stored the thing in her ear, and when I took off the restraints to one of her hands, I couldn't imagine why she was reaching for her ear instead of pointing me in an appropriate direction to find it. It was a bit like a clown performing the old coin-out-of-the-ear trick, though of course her magic didn't involve slipping anything down a baggy sleeve. Indeed, it was written in jibberish, but it looked authentic enough, and if Hoshiya was lying, I had the means to take her out with a single press.) Gormos was dragged into the fiasco, half because he had already been witness to my scheming and it was better not to leave him behind to spill the beans, half because he owned his own ship, and half because I couldn't imagine a life in outer space without him. (Of course, I didn't and would never admit to the grossly sentimental and superfluous last half.)
To ensure the Faerie wasn't going to go back on her promise, I forced her into a blood bond, something I knew to be unbreakably sacred to Faeries. With a switchblade borrowed from Gormos, we carved twin pentagrams into our palms and pressed the two dripping diagrams together. Her blood, like most Faeries, was a washed-out yellow, mine a dark red. The two colors combined in a single orange drop, staining the hospital sheets. She grimaced at the stain unhappily, tracing its edges with her free hand.
"See its shape? It foretells misery," she proclaimed.
"Save it for your psychic hotline," I sneered.
I planned the escape like this: I would authorize Hoshiya's release from the hospital wing and would supposedly sedate her so I could transfer her in a wheelchair without the aid of any guards. While I would superficially handcuff her to the wheelchair, I would leave her fingers unrestrained so she could cast magic—nothing destructive, but something persuasive to get past guards. Meanwhile, Gormos would gather our belongings and sneak back into work (he had been on the clock all while visiting me, unsurprisingly), and make sure there was a clear, inconspicuous, pedestrian path to his ship. We would sneak on the ship (taking the wheelchair with us—I wanted at least one souvenir of my career as an intergalactic doctor), and hopefully depart without being detected as suspicious, under the space station assumption that Gormos was taking his newly-tuned craft for a test run.
Then we would jump into hyperdrive and make a smooth escape to our first destination.
The hardest part of planning, in fact, hinged upon figuring out what areas of space we should first explore. The map, as it turned out, was less of a map and more of an epic poem, filled with discreet symbolism and secret codes to ensure that the ordinary mind couldn't utilize the directions. Hoshiya, in the possession of the map for half a century, had failed to decipher a single line of the poem, had resorted to wandering, and through an unfortunate string of events, ended up where we found her. She barely needed the words to recite the poem: it seemed to be imprinted on her heart from reading it repeatedly.
Upon speaking the poem's words, Hoshiya's voice seemed to smooth out, losing the gruff, mercenary quality she used with me. It was almost pleasant-sounding.
The poem went as follows:
Listen, Faerie mum and child,
Listen now and listen well—
Listen, Faeries sweet and mild
For the pathway to the well.
The strong who seek eternal life
Must gather these things four:
Mirror, brick, feather, and knife;
Sight, screen, color, and war.
Sight will not come from the eyes
But from those who can listen.
In the hall where the lady cries,
The mirror waits, and glistens.
Screen will be found in a belt
That girds a waist with rock.
A waist where deadly things are smelt:
A warring, uprising block.
Color will be from the crown
Of a beauteous beast.
Long in darkness, light in down
On Faerie flesh it feasts.
War will be found where one keeps
A thousand secrets stored.
In dark and chambered caverns sleeps
That dismal blood-stained sword.
Combine the four with royalty
At thy weary side.
Cling fast to thy loyalty:
Hearts this potion divides.
Drink of its wine and live thy life
For all eternity—
And dodge the tumult and the strife
Within modernity.
"Did the Faerie who wrote that have any concept of meter?" I asked acidly after Hoshiya had finished her recitation. She glared at me spitefully, and didn't reply.
Immediately, Gormos and I began putting our heads together to decipher definite locations from the poem's vague allusions. "The first has got to be referring to Aishas," I said, pounding down my fist on my marked had with determination. "I mean, who can listen better than a species with six ears? There's no other species that exceeds that many hearing units. Gormos, you know stuff about the Aisha home world. Is there a hall with a depressed lady somewhere?"
"Uh, well, we could check the Sacred Cavern," Gormos suggested, pulling on his whiskers in thought. "It's a bit of a holy shrine for Aishas, but they do let tourists get a glimpse. We might have to twist some arms to get in, though. Rumor has it some royal Aisha died there ages ago waiting for her lost love, and her ghost haunts the Sacred Cavern cryin' its little eyes out."
"Alright. That's the first place we'll head, then. What about this brick? I'm pretty sure they're referring to an asteroid belt, but the only one I can think of is uncivilized," I said, tugging at the tips of my hair. "You know, the one circling the Delta-Phi solar system."
"We should … still check there," Gormos said slowly, as if reluctant to heed my suggestion. "We might find something interesting." I looked over at him with a raised eyebrow, suspicious of his tone. Gormos held his paws up defensively, though his eyes didn't have the typical, innocent don't-look-at-me shimmer to them he normally used. "That's all I'm sayin' for sure."
"Alright, then let's make Delta-Phi our principle stop for the brick … and maybe by then, Gormos will be able to say something for sure," I said sarcastically, giving Gormos a nasty look. "Color is totally obvious." Gormos and I exchanged looks, and pointed twin finger-guns at one another.
"Flesh-Eatin' Phoenix!" we said together, and then proceeded to gnaw on our right forearms.
"What does that even mean?" Hoshiya asked, barely concealing the anxiety that the phrase caused her.
"Oh, just a little in-joke. We had an inmate come in here once who tried to get a little 'color' himself from the Flesh-Eating Phoenix. Which is basically this huge monster that's only called a phoenix 'cause it has colored feathers and grows back whatever you shoot off it with a laser. Nobody really knows how it got where it is, but the Flesh-Eating Phoenix and a black hole kind of sandwich a big intergalactic black market trade route, so smugglers usually wind up tusslin' with the Phoenix to avoid getting sucked into the hole," Gormos explained.
"Kind of a Charybdis-or-Scylla situation," I elaborated.
"Anyway, this inmate—while smuggling—somehow it in his tiny head that the feathers of this beastie were valuable, which they're not. Wound up losin' an arm and other essential bits and pieces," Gormos said mischeviously. "Totally crazy, too. Came in waving his stumps around, screaming about the beastie."
"Yeah, funny for you, not funny for the doctor deluging him with antipsychotic meds," I mumbled, rolling my eyes in remembrance. "Anyway, forget the Phoenix for now. What about this last one? The knife? Know any dark, beating caves?"
"Um, not beating. Things made out of rock tend not to beat very much," Gormos said in utter seriousness. "But, it might be talking about a black hole."
"A good idea, but I'm not sure how much a black hole pulsates. Maybe a pulsar?"
"Maybe, but pulsars are bright, not dark, and I really wouldn't want to approach one too closely, unless I wanted to fry the outside of my ship," Gormos said, shaking his head.
"What, you think diving head-first into a black hole is a better option?" I snorted. "If anything, the black hole's going to do worse damage to your ship, not to mention the innocents being squeezed into oblivion inside."
"Maybe we should just let that one sit for a while," Gormos suggested with a shrug. "We already got ideas for the other three. Maybe we'll just stumble upon four on the way."
"Why am I contributing exactly nothing to this conversation?" Hoshiya called from her hospital bed, a space that had been excluded from Gormos and my brainstorming circle. I stopped pacing for a moment to look over my shoulder and reply.
"Because you've been in possession of this poem for fifty some years and have gotten absolutely jack squat out of it—you obviously have no ideas to contribute. Unless, of course, you do. In that case, would you care to share them with us?" I gestured to an invisible stage at the foot of her bed, miming the expectance of a performance. She raised her lip in a snarl, but failed to contribute anything further to our exchange.