Jing marches out the hotel, onto a street that's the color of a faded newspaper photograph. The breeze nips at his nose, bringing the stink from the nearby docks, and Jing keeps moving, long strides leading him towards the sea.
His route winds down forgettable little roads, over cracked pavements, past buildings scabbed with salt. He pauses when he reaches a crossroad, and raises his face to the wind. His ears strain to listen. Wei's heart thumps in his chest.
The only other person on the street is an old woman who's about to tip a bucket of water into the gutter.
"I need to get a bearing on your guy again," Jing asks Wei. "Can I do that?"
Again? Wei can still taste blood from the last time that Jing tried to do his spirit bullshit. Still, that doesn't seem like a good enough reason to complain; the taste is faint, and Wei's never had much of a life expectancy anyway. Wei nods.
Again, there's the sensation of blinking.
Wei sees patterns once more, but they're no longer so overwhelming, no longer bright enough that they might burn his mind out. There's still the vague sense that he shouldn't be looking at them, but so what? He'll look at whatever he likes, thank you very much. No one gets to tell him what to do. Not anymore.
And it occurs to him that maybe he can do more with the patterns than just look at them. Change the configuration, change the function. Some of the patterns are humans. What would happen if you altered them? What purpose would they then serve? That's a horrible thought, isn't it? That people can be repurposed. But it's true. They're just big dumb animals anyway. Messy little tangles of wants and needs, always hungry, always devouring. Living things survive by stealing energy from each other. It's a dog-eat-dog world, buddy. And, in all fairness, bosintang tastes pretty good.
Then something shifts, and Wei refocuses.
The street still looks the same. The old woman has just finished emptying the bucket. Wei can't taste any more blood, but he can smell it slightly, though no longer sure if the blood is his own.
"He's moved," Jing says, from somewhere distant. "He's moved in the past ten minutes." Then he seems to think about something, and adds, "Crap."
"What?" says Wei.
"We've just missed him. He's headed out to sea."
The old woman looks up and fixes them with a stare. Jing ignores her and walks on, then slips into a yard behind a boarded-up shop.
Once they're sure they have some privacy, Jing continues, "The further he is from land, the harder he'll be to track. And the sea isn't a good place to be right now. The boundaries are very thin, and there are... A lot of people out there who don't like humans."
"Yeah, that's..." Wei begins, then forces himself to focus on reality. "Wait. You're saying he's actually at sea right now?"
"Yes. Just about."
"What about the shirshu?"
"The shirshu's now in a truck heading north, in the opposite direction from him."
"And what the fuck does that mean?"
"I'm not sure, possibly that if the shirshu tracker was looking for him, then they've found him, and their job is done, and they're now heading back home. Or maybe the target noticed he was being tracked, and now he's gone out to sea in the hope that it'll break the trail."
"How far out to sea is our guy right now?"
"About a mile."
"And, what, you think we should follow him?"
"Yes."
"And catch up with him? While he's at sea?"
"Yes."
"How the fuck do we fight a waterbender at sea?"
"The same way you'd fight an earthbender who's on land?" Jing says. "Or an airbender who's... in an environment with air? That's not our main issue. Frankly, I'm more concerned with-"
"Yeah, but-" Wei isn't sure where he's going with this. He can't argue that it's too dangerous to fight the bloodbender while he's in his element. The bloodbender is always in his element. Technically, he's made of his element.
"What do you mean he's heading out to sea?" Wei asks. "Is he on a boat? Is he swimming? Is he floating face-down in the water? Has he decided to fuck off back to whatever fuckin' abyssal trench he was spawned from? What?"
"He's on a ship. There are fifteen other people aboard, nine men and six women, all very healthy. The ship runs on coal and is travelling at five knots, maybe. It's slowly accelerating. It's a..." Jing hesitates as if he's lost his train of thought, and for just a split second, Wei almost believes that there's a third person in his head with him, although they're not really a person, just a ghost of one. "...It's a... It was a Garsai-class frigate. It's an old ship. Badly maintained. I can't you much more."
A stab of pain lances through Wei's temples. He tries to concentrate.
"What if, instead of following Am-... Captain Fuckface, we tried following the shirshu tracker and wringing some information out of him?" Wei asks, because the whole idea of fighting a waterbender at sea still sounds stupid. (Not that the stupidity of an idea has ever deterred Wei from acting on it before.) "I want to know who else is tracking our man."
"We could do that, but I don't actually care about the shirshu tracker because the shirshu tracker isn't someone whose mind I want to eat," Jing says though gritted teeth, and Wei gets it. He feels a pang of something that isn't quite hunger, and isn't quite lust. A jolt of intense curiosity, perhaps. He needs to find the bloodbender, and then this whole mess will reach its conclusion, and they can move on to something else. The bloodbender is just a component.
"Alright," Wei says. "Can't we just wait for our guy to reach land again, and then we can attack him when, y'know, he's not on a ship?"
"Why do you want to delay things further?"
"I don't. I'm just not sure if we wanna pick a fight with a waterbender at sea right now. Unless you got any bright ideas? Any spirit magic crap that'd give us an edge?"
Jing frowns. "I'm saving my energy for opening a door back to the spirit world."
That figures. Wei doesn't know how it figures, but it does. The physical world is too heavy and inelegant. You need to dig your way out of it. (Wei's headache persists, but he no longer cares.)
"Can't you get more?" Wei muses.
"What?"
"More energy." The idea just pops into Wei's mind by itself. He thinks of the stories about foxes eating human organs. Don't spirits become stronger if they feed off mortals?
Jing hesitates, then says, "I don't think that's necessary."
"Yet eating minds is okay."
Jing hesitates again. "It's just the one mind."
"Right. Just one. You can stop whenever you want."
Jing lets his hands fall down by his sides, and looks around the yard as if picking out an escape route.
"Aren't foxes meant to go nuts about eating hearts, or livers, or something like that?" Wei asks. "Though it's not as if you're doing that kind of shit. You just want to eat a mind. Just one mind. Actually, it's technically your second mind, but... Hey, it's not like it's a problem."
Jing still doesn't speak. His breathing has quickened.
"Knowledge is power, right?" Wei says.
"Look," says Jing, and refrains from adding 'you little shit', "I don't need to... To resort to certain measures. I'm perfectly confident in my-"
"Do you have to eat the liver raw, or can you fry it with peppers?" Wei says, because he's enjoying himself again.
"Wei, that's-"
"What about hearts? They're best pan-seared. Though brains are your thing, right? They go better in soup."
"There are lines we will not cross," Jing says, very slowly.
"Yeah, that's what everyone says when they start out. Maybe you should be honest with yourself and just skip ahead to the part where you've become everything you hate. Might save time. Spare you the slow, painful process of gradual disillusionment." Wei knows about slippery slopes. Wei has been down so many slippery slopes during his lifetime that, by this point, he just wants to zoom down them with his hands in the air while going 'wheeeeeeeee'. "Anyway, whatever. What's your plan for chasing after our bloodbender?"
Something unfurls behind Wei's temples and, for a split second, it's like his brainpan has been filled with phosphorus.
It happens too fast for him to scream.
Then Jing takes a huge breath and counts to ten, like a parent who's just caught themselves before they could slap their misbehaving child.
With great patience, Jing asks, "What the hell is your problem?"
Wei realizes that he's put both his hands over his forehead. He carefully lowers them.
"I'd need at least two hours to answer that properly," Wei says, before it occurs to him to apologize. Jing dislikes rudeness. Wei's words come out small and sad, colored by his awareness that he was being an asshole for no good reason just a moment ago, "Sorry. I'm just... Not myself, I guess."
Jing yawns to make himself relax, and looks up at the grey sky. His voice is gentle again. "I should expect as much. Under the circumstances, you're holding up remarkably well. Still, the sooner we get things over with, the better." He sniffs at the breeze, just enough to catch the scent of the harbor again, and says, "Anyway. Moving on. We'll need to steal a boat."
Wei clears his throat, and tries to convince himself that he's a functional grown-up who's capable of handling stressful life events such as betrayal, revenge missions, intermittent hallucinations, and spirit possession.
"I figure that's just like stealing a Satomobile," Wei says. He's stolen a Satomobile before. Which now seems kind of funny given that he works - no wait, worked, past-tense again - with a guy who owned warehouses full of the things.
"Then we need to catch up with our target," Jing continues, "and..."
"And infiltrate a ship that contains a bunch of guards and a human weapon who can control water. At sea." Wei already hates the sea. Fuck the sea.
"Um," says Jing.
They stand there and reconsider their choices. Their shitty, awful choices.
Wei scratches his chin.
"Hey. If you're saving your energy for opening a door between worlds, then what if you used my chi to give you a, fuck it, I don't know, a boost? So's you'd have an extra kick up the ass in a fight, y'know," Wei says, although he can't believe he's asking this. "Just to improve our odds."
Jing seems to recoil. "Uh, because then you'll accuse me of being some sort of parasite?"
Wei almost says, I figure you're a parasite already, but something stops him. He knows, he just knows, that this comment would not go down well.
"Nah," Wei says. "I just know that you don't get anything without paying for it, and I'm willing to pay extra if it means I get to punch a waterbender in the balls."
"Are you seriously consenting to let me borrow your life? Really?"
"I've wasted my entire life anyway, and... Put it this way: given my career history, I don't think anyone would be willing to sell me life insurance by this point. And I always knew spirits'd be the death of me, I just figured they'd be the kind in a bottle. What the hell. Use me as a battery."
"You are the most inconsistent human I have ever met!" Jing snaps. "You don't trust me at all, but then you go and offer yourself like this!"
Wei stops himself from asking, 'Why do you care?' which is probably yet another thing that would make Jing mad, and instead says, "Huh. I really piss you off."
"I'm trying to act in your best interests, which is rather difficult when you don't seem to know what your best interests actually are." Jing crosses his arms and leans against the wall. He's scowling, but it's a contemplative kind of scowling. Wei gets the sense of machinery moving, somewhere out of sight. "...Fine. If the situation calls for it, then I will borrow a tiny bit of chi from you. Just enough for me to make the physical world a bit less solid. And you'll only have a bad case of anaemia for a while. Nothing worse. It won't make a massive improvement to our effectiveness in combat, but... Whatever."
"Okay."
"For the record," Jing says, holding up his index finger, "if I did burn enough chi for it to make a massive improvement to our effectiveness in combat, your mind wouldn't be able to handle it, and you would probably go mad with power, and then die."
Wei considers this. "Would I laugh maniacally and get, like, glowing eyes and shit?"
"No. And... No."
Well, that's no fun. It looks like Wei will have to continue being the boring kind of mad, which apparently involves heavy drinking, poor sleeping habits, an oversensitivity to loud noises, and the constant nagging feeling that something horrible is about to happen at any given moment. Being mad with power seems a lot more enjoyable than being mad with powerlessness. Wei shrugs. "So if we're not gonna be that much stronger than normal, then what other kinda advantages are we gonna have in this fight?"
"Let me think," says Jing.
They think.
"...What did you just say about people hating humans?" Wei muses. "By 'people', you mean other spirits, right? Other spirits hate humans?"
"Yes," Jing says. "But. They wouldn't help us if we asked them."
"Why not?"
"I'm not... I mean, we have ideological differences," Jing mutters. "They think you're vermin. I think you're an interesting species that merits further study."
"They hate humans," Wei mutters.
"Yes."
"The other spirits hate humans."
"Yes, Wei. That they do. They do hate humans."
Wei nods slowly. "Then who says we need to ask for their help?"
Little cogs turn.
"...Oh," says Jing, as Wei's idea comes into focus, bleeding through to him. Then he says, "Oh," a second time, as if he's just had it confirmed that Wei is batshit insane. "I see. That's..."
Wei waits for Jing's opinion.
"That might feasible," Jing says. "I mean, maybe I'm only saying this because we're both still drunk, but. That might be feasible."
"We just need to create a distraction, grab the bloodbender, and run, right?" Wei says. "We don't gotta kick anyone's ass. We just want the one guy. And all we gotta do is incapacitate him so's we can drag him into the spirit world."
Wei's comment lingers in his mind for a moment - so's we can drag him into the spirit world - and he isn't sure why he said we and not you. Why the hell would Wei want to go back to the spirit world?
Then again, given the plan they have in mind, Wei won't want to hang around in the physical world for long after they've grabbed the bloodbender.
"We just need to confuse the shit out of everyone so they're not looking too close at us," Wei muses. "That's all."
Jing lets out an unhappy little chortle. "You make it sound so simple, but yes."
"Well, we got a plan then."
"Sort of. But I don't understand. The, um... The plan that you're proposing right now has an even greater chance of failure than my original idea of just shooting the bloodbender from a rooftop. Which, I might add, you refused to do because you said it was too risky."
"To be fair," Wei says, "I reckon the increased risk is offset by the fact that this plan will look a hell of a lot less chickenshit than shooting a guy in the back."
Jing only grunts (and there's something so Wei-like the grunt that Wei starts to wonder if he's just been talking to himself all day) and starts walking again.
The sky darkens.
Wei is right about boats: stealing one is no worse than trying to steal a Satomobile. The hardest part is locating one that's suitable, and that's mostly a matter of luck.
The nicest boats belong to the harbor patrol, and the harbor patrolmen look like a bunch of bargain-basement cops, so Jing sniffs the air in order to figure out their routes, then finds a nice warehouse with a good view of the surrounding wharves.
Jing climbs onto the warehouse's roof, assembles his bow, and waits for a patrolman to pass by. Sure enough, some luckless asshole in a uniform pootles by on his little motorboat, quite unaware that some human-spirit abomination is about to snipe him from a rooftop.
Jing dings the harbor patrolman in the shoulder (the guy topples forwards with a small yelp), then slips down to ground level before making a preposterously huge leap from the wharf to the patrol boat. He lands with a thump, sticks out his arms as the boat wobbles under his feet, and then he gingerly takes the control column so he can steer the boat to the side of the wharf.
He's just in the process of hauling the patrolman back onto land, intent on hiding him behind some crates, when Wei asks, "Wait, is this guy dead?"
"Shirshu venom, Wei. Like I told you. He's just knocked out, that's all," Jing says. "Besides, look at the puncture wound. It's a shallow injury."
"Huh."
Jing then pauses. "...You know, we should steal his uniform so people will think we're a patrolman as well."
"That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard," Wei whispers back, regardless of the fact that he really wants to do that. Still, there's no way he's removing another guy's clothing ever again unless the guy respects him and buys him dinner first.
They leave the patrolman with his pants on, and return to the boat so they can make a quick inspection of it. The fuel tank is almost full (Wei's luck isn't shit all the time), and the engine is nice and easy to figure out. Better yet, there's a good length of rope and a grappling hook stowed away in one the boat's compartments.(Jing lets out a quiet 'woo hoo!' at this discovery, while Wei just wonders if he can still throw a bola with any accuracy. It's been a while.)
Wei putters away from the wharf, and only applies the throttle once they're a safe distance away.
As the sky turns from grey to black, and Ruyi recedes into the distance until it looks like a cluster of lights, Jing speaks again. "So, I take it that you saw how I shot that patrolman? Wasn't that a good shot?"
"I guess," says Wei
"I think it was such a good shot."
Wei stares out to sea, even though there's fuck-all to look at.
"There was hardly any blood. And I only hit muscle. Not bone. No, no damage to the underlying skeleton whatsever. And I avoided all of the major blood vessels," Jing continues.
"Yeah. Great," Wei mutters.
"I can tell you about all the blood vessels you have in your arms, you know," says Jing. "I know where they all are!"
"Good for you."
"It's all just like engineering, really. Plumbing, even."
"Okay."
"I'm like a surgeon."
"Sure."
"Surgeons are just meat engineers anyway."
"Right."
"Such a good shot," Jing repeats.
"That's great, kiddo. Congrats."
Jing spends the next twenty minutes of the boat ride with a stupid smirk on his face.
The boat ploughs through the gentle waves. Wei might hate the sea, but the sea, it seems, does not hate Wei right now. It's a calm, clear night, illuminated by a crescent moon, although Wei still shivers. His surroundings are utterly alien to him. He's used to buildings, and people, and movement. The endless expanse of water doesn't look quite real.
"Hey Jing," Wei says, because he's beginning to miss the sound of his own voice, "I was wondering: what if I'm just going nuts, and you're just a really convincing hallucination? Because I keep, uh... I mean, are you a hallucination?"
Jing gives this some thought, then answers, "I don't feel like I'm a hallucination."
Wei forces a tired smile. He almost wishes he was still in the hotel room with the booze. "Maybe I'm the hallucination. Are you hallucinating me?"
"The existence that we know is all one great illusion anyway. You're hallucinating yourself."
"Thought I would've hallucinated something better than this."
Jing wiggles his eyebrows. "If I hallucinated you, I'd congratulate myself for hallucinating such a nice pair of legs."
"Not helping, Jing."
"Sorry."
"Y'know, speaking of which..." Wei says, and thinks of the red stage and the patterns. "You can make people see illusions, right? Like the 'turning rocks into money' thing. That's like the sort of stuff I'd hear about in stories as a kid. Proper old-fashioned spirit shit."
"Yes. I need to give you a demonstration when we have the time," Jing says. "Although, it probably wouldn't work on you, because you'd already be convinced that the rocks were rocks. You wouldn't be able to suspend your disbelief."
"So you can make people hallucinate. If you want to." Wei considers the implications of this, then... Doesn't really feel as angry about those implications as he should. Maybe the anger's just going to creep up on him slowly. Maybe he'll be seething mad in, oh, say... Two hours or so, once he's convinced himself that his (recent) psychological issues are all Jing's fault.
"In a fashion," Jing admits. "I can just change what they perceive and what they remember, which kind of go together."
"You can change people's memories?"
Change the configuration, change the function.
Now Jing sounds uneasy. "Technically. Yes."
Technically? "How much can you change them? Can you re-write a few minutes here and there, or what?"
"I... don't know. I think I could. I've never tried it before."
"But you can eat memories, right?"
"Yes."
"Which means, what, their owner loses them completely?"
"So far, yes," Jing says, in the voice of someone who's just realized, too late, that honesty isn't always the best policy.
Wei would ask about why he keeps seeing a red stage, but a different concern springs to mind, and this new concern takes priority:
"So if I got arrested while you were possessing me," Wei says, "you could just wipe all my memories of you, and then you could skedaddle and no one would know you were ever involved. And I'd just look like some whackjob who was simply out for revenge against Amon, right?"
Oh.
That's...
Is that what Wei's been struggling to realize all along? That he's just a thing which can be rewritten?
"It would've been a last resort," Jing says. He doesn't even try to lie. "But even then, I'm not sure I would've... Wei, please understand. It would've been a last resort."
Wei isn't even sure if he's capable of anger any more. There's an icy deadness where the anger is meant to be. It's almost quite nice.
Wei just snorts at Jing, and Jing seems to withdraw, cowering away from Wei's awareness.
They travel in silence for a while.
"Can I ask for a favor?" Wei says, once he's willing to speak again. The favor is one that's worth asking. For all Jing's issues, the spirit still seems to have a conscience, which is much more than you can say for a lot of humans.
Jing's voice is an apologetic murmur. "Yes?"
"If I get arrested, don't mess with my memory. Just kill me."
"You're not going to get arrested."
"Right."
"If anything happened to you, it'd reflect badly on me."
"We just went over this. If anything happened to me, no one would have to know you were ever involved."
"Well, I'd feel bad about it," Jing mutters, and looks at his shoes. They're nice shoes. Not that this makes the situation any better.
"Yeah?" Wei says. "Why?"
Jing raises his left hand so he can look at it, holding it palm upwards. He wiggles his fingers. The fingers are long and pale, but they look strong. There's only a faint line of scarring across the knuckles. They're articulate hands. Hands made for fixing things, not for punching people. They would've been so much better if the fingers had never been broken during Wei's lifetime, but...
"I don't know," Jing says. "I like you."
"Fucking with my head and leaving me alive would be the worst thing you could do to me," Wei says, slowly. "Do you understand?"
"I think so," says Jing.
Wei doesn't like the uncertainty in the spirit's voice.
He also gets the distinct feeling, once again, that he's obtained access to something that's incredibly dangerous.
He pulls his coat tighter around himself.
"We would've liked you in the Equalists," Wei murmurs. "Whenever someone wanted to leave the organisation, we could've got you to fix them. Wipe their minds squeaky clean." Maybe plant some disinformation on them as well, in case they got interrogated by cops later.
"I wouldn't just eat memories indiscriminately," Jing says, peevish. "I'm not some kind of... Some kind of trash incinerator for unwanted thoughts."
His indignation makes Wei remember something Jing said when they first met: if Amon HAD approached us and asked us for assistance, then some of us would have been happy to oblige.
And:
But that would have required respect on his part.
"I'm just saying..." Wei murmurs. Wait, what was he saying? "...We would've liked you. You would've been venerated." And don't people always need something to venerate? (If you don't have anything to look up to, then why bother getting out of bed in the morning?)
Jing gives an amused little 'hmph', although he sounds just a bit pathetic as he says, "I guess some positive attention might've been nice for a change."
A gloomy silence settles over the two of them, and neither of them make much effort to fight it off. Positive attention. Now there's a concept.
Wei resumes watching the horizon. He now has a thought that won't leave him alone.
A good while passes before Jing snaps Wei out of his contemplation. "Wait. I think this is the place. Stop here."
"Why?" They're surrounded by water and darkness. There's hardly any wind. The boat engine is the only noise. Ruyi is just a distant twinkling thing on the mainland.
"The skin between the worlds is thin."
Wei decreases the throttle until the boat slows to a halt. He refuses to feel any sort of anxiety. Jing reaches into his coat pocket and takes out a handkerchief, which he ties around Wei's face.
"Wait a minute, you blew my nose in this handkerchief," Wei says, just as Jing fastens the knot.
"Really?" Jing stands there in mute horror for a moment. "...Well, it's not like anyone will be looking at it too closely out here," he murmurs, before looking at the black water. "Can you feel that?"
"Feel what? Are you asking if I can feel that you blew my fucking nose in this handkerchief?"
"No. That."
"What?"
"Look at the hair on your arms," Jing says.
Wei rolls back a sleeve. By the moonlight, he can just barely see that there's gooseflesh on his forearms.
"Yeah? It's cold. So what?" says Wei.
"You're not very sensitive, are you?" Jing grumbles. "Maybe that's why you're coping so well. Listen. Don't your ears feel strange?"
Maybe it's the power of suggestion, but now Jing mentions it, Wei does feel an odd pressure in his sinuses.
"Yeah, we're good." Jing turns away from the steering wheel and leans over the side of the boat. "Right. I have to write something inflammatory. Can I borrow some of your blood?"
"Why?"
"I need it to write with. Just a few drops. For the chi in it." Jing pauses. "Technically, there are other bodily fluids I could use, but... Let's just go with blood. A teeny-tiny amount of blood. Nothing that you'd miss."
Well, whatever. Wei did say that he'd let Jing borrow some chi.
Wei pats his pockets for a sharp object. "I don't have a knife. You forgot to get me one."
Jing wrinkles his nose. "Damn. Let me think," he says, and stares into space for a few seconds. Then he announces, "Think happy thoughts!" and, before Wei can ask what he means, he brings his right hand to his mouth and sinks his teeth into the pad of his thumb.
"MOTHERFUCKER," Wei yells.
There's blood, alright. Wei never realized what sharp teeth he had. The blood wells up the crescent-shaped wound and threatens to run down Wei's arm. Still, on a (questionable) positive note, it doesn't actually hurt much. It looks more painful than it is.
"Sorry," says Jing, before holding his hand over the water and letting a few drops fall.
The drops emanate an unearthly glow when they touch the sea, and they settle like oil. Jing reaches out and traces the blood into a few word-like squiggles with his index finger. The squiggles burn with the same blue-white light as a welding arc.
"Is that glow due to ionization or what?" Wei asks. "What is that shit, exactly?"
"I could answer that if I knew what ionization was."
"It's... Never mind. Those are words, right? You've just written some words on the sea. What do they say?"
Jing leans back to admire his handiwork, and frowns. "Well, they can have multiple interpretations."
"Like what?"
"One interpretation would be 'Vaatu can choke on my dick'. Another interpretation would be 'Vaatu can suck shit through a straw out of a humanity's collective wrinkly sphincter'. It could also be 'Vaatu is cordially invited to lick dog piss off the pavement while fucking a pigsheep,' or 'Vaatu will ultimately be vanquished by Raava because even chaos is subject to mathematical principles. For instance, if one was to create a device that generated random outcomes, then one would need to use specific algorithm in order to do so, and therefore this proves that even chaos is defined by order'." Jing clears his throat. "However, I think my favorite interpretation is, 'Vaatu holds no real power because there is no such thing as duality, there is only the void, AND also Vaatu can eat my asshole'."
"You wrote spirit graffiti," Wei says.
"I think it's quite good," says Jing.
Wei squints. "Who's Vaatu?"
"Someone who, um, I shouldn't be publicly disrespecting right now."
"Yeah? What makes him so great?"
"He's the spirit of disorder."
Wei thinks about this critically. "Wouldn't the spirit of disorder enjoy licking dog piss and having sex with farm animals?"
"I failed to consider that. Now you mention it, it's probably quite difficult to offend him." Jing looks disappointed. "Perhaps people will be more offended by the part about how even chaos can be expressed by algorithms."
"Yeah, that bit was pretty fucking smug. So what now?"
"We wait."
"How long for?"
"Might be a few hours. Who knows. The graffiti will increase our likelihood of attracting attention, although sea spirits tend to attack anything that gives off heat anyway. Bad memories from the war, I suppose. And you're warm-blooded, so-"
"I'm good bait."
"Precisely."
"I dunno how long I'll be warm-blooded for if I stay out here. It's freezing." Wei goes to rub his palms together for warmth, then remembers that his thumb is still bleeding.
He goes to stick his thumb in his mouth, but Jing stops him.
Jing breathes on his hands, and numbness seeps through Wei's fingers, all the way down to his elbows. The pain in his thumb disappears completely.
"...What did you just do?" Wei asks, uneasy, even as he feels sensation quickly returning to his flesh.
"Oh," Jing says, "Didn't that feel good? Sorry, I thought I'd just-"
Wei's ears pop as if there's been a sudden change in air pressure.
"What the fuck did you do?" Wei says, quieter now.
"Um, that bit wasn't me..." Jing says, then shuts up.
Lights appear around the boat. The lights glow darkly. A rational person might say that a light cannot glow darkly, but these lights clearly do not give a shit about the opinions of rational people. Hell, Wei gets the sense that rationality is no longer applies to his life. Reality suddenly seems even less solid than it did previously, and that's no mean feat given that Wei has already spent far too much time seriously wondering if he's the hallucination of a talking dog.
Very slowly, very clearly, Jing says, "Wei, please open the throttle all the way. I'll steer."
Wei floors it. The boat roars forwards in a burst of sea spray and engine fumes. Wei hangs on to the steering wheel as the sea wind whips at his face. The pressure in his ears hurts now.
There is something behind them.
"OKAY, FAIR WARNING," Jing shouts over the engine noise. "DON'T LOOK BACK OVER YOUR SHOULDER."
Wei looks back over his shoulder.
He doesn't know what he's looking at, but all he can comprehend is that it's huge, and it has a lot of teeth. It's mouth is a hole in reality that's full of razors. Then it disappears back below the water, so all Wei can see is a ragged fin, as tall as he is. The fin glows with... well, not bioluminescence, because the thing that's following him isn't biological. Even the light emanating from it looks toxic. And Wei thinks, Is this how spirits really are? Even Jing?
"AAAUGH I TOLD YOU," Jing bellows at him.
"Seen worse," says Wei, as he tears his gaze away and blinks after-images away from his eyes. He imagines distant stars, and things that burn in icy darkness. He becomes too aware of how small and fragile he is. "Er. Is that Vaatu?" he asks.
Jing laughs raggedly. "NOT EVEN CLOSE."
The boat speeds onwards, a flimsy material thing from somewhere warm and young, pursued by something uglier and stronger from somewhere old and dark.