“I was in your head for months,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “I even know what Star Wars is.”
A cracking sound like calving ice echoes through the passage. “Do I want to know what that was?” I say.
“That was you,” he says. He nods toward my right arm. I pull up my sleeve. The green stone inches its way toward my hand. In here where there’s no ambient noise the sound of the jade crawling down my right arm might as well be a gunshot.
“That stunt you pulled out on the street has cut your time even further. You don’t have much left,” Mictlantecuhtli says, as if it’s something I don’t already know. “Pretty soon it’ll be too late.”
“I told you I didn’t— Ya know, never mind. Let’s just keep moving.”
There’s only one way to go: up. So up we go. We walk through the passage, footsteps echoing back to us. We make some sharp turns, but mostly it just curves a little with a gentle upward slope. I really hope that the weird time and distance thing where everything felt further than it was that I experienced outside the city is working here, too. Otherwise, if we need to get to the top of this thing we’ll be at it for days.
After what feels like an hour the hallway dead ends in a blank wall. Mictlantecuhtli stares at it for a long time.
“Problem?”
“I haven’t been here in five hundred years,” he says. “Cut me some slack. Oh, there we go.” He presses a portion of the wall that looks like everything else in here and the wall fades away like smoke. The doorway opens onto a wide room with lit pine torches and tzompantli lining the walls, the impaled skulls grinning at us.
“How high up are we?”
“Couple floors,” he says.
“That long for a couple of floors?”
“From the top.”
“Oh,” it hadn’t felt like we’d gone that far in that amount of time. “Would she have brought Tabitha here?”
“Her avatar? Possibly. Why?” We walk through the room into an adjoining hallway. Everything looks pretty much the same as everything else. How the hell does he know where we’re going?
I tell him about the handcuff, about blocking the connection between Tabitha and Santa Muerte. How Tabitha refused to take it off. And that last bit is something I don’t even know what to do with.
“She didn’t seem happy when they left,” I say.
“I don’t doubt it,” he says. “Avatars aren’t meant to be individuals. They’re extensions of gods. They’re our eyes and ears outside. Most gods can’t actually leave their domains. Mictecacihuatl and I can’t. We can project our consciousness, but physically move among mortals? We need an avatar for that.”
Something about that twigs something in my memory but I can’t place it. It’s just out of reach, and the harder I grasp at it the further away it gets. I let it go. If it’s what I think it is it’ll come to me when I need it.
“So what do you do when an avatar stops being just an extension?”
“Simple. Get rid of it. Find another one.”
“Get rid of how?” I say, knowing I won’t like the answer.
“Kill it. How else?”
That is so not going to happen.
“Where would she be keeping her? You mentioned cells before. Would she be locked up? On this floor? Or another one?”
“How the hell would I know what she’s doing with it?” he says. “The cells are in the basement, but I doubt she’d put it there. If her avatar is broken, and it sounds like it is, the sooner she gets rid of it the better.”
“So she’s got her with her. Okay. I can work with that.” I find Santa Muerte, I find Tabitha, I find the knife. I kill everybody who gets in my way.
“Hey. Stay focused,” Mictlantecuhtli says. “You don’t have time for this bullshit. That means I don’t have time, either. We find Mictecacihuatl, get the blade, and you finish the job.”
“Excuse me?” I say. “You’re acting like I give a flying fuck about you. You want this to end well? Then you fucking help me find her.”
“We are in this together, you little shit,” he says. “So when I say—” He stops when footsteps round a corner. We both turn to look.
Warriors in jaguar skins. At least twenty pour into the other end of the hall with macuahuitls and spears and sneers showing too many teeth.
I think one of them is the guy whose head I pulped on the roof. It’s partly his look but really more that he’s the first one who screams and rushes us.
“Run,” Mictlantecuhtli says, and bolts down the hall.
“Run?” I yell as I catch up to him. “You’re Mictlantecuhtli. You’re the king of Mictlan. Aren’t they supposed to listen to you?”
“I’m not exactly at my most imposing at the moment.” All of the halls and rooms look the same. Bare floors, pine torches, tzompantli on fucking everything. You’d think after a few hundred years they’d come up with something a little more interesting than skulls. “I’ll draw them off. You find Mictecacihuatl and get that knife back.”