The Twisted Vine Read online

  The Twisted Vine

  by Alyce Caswell

  Copyright © Alyce Caswell 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Hampton Lamoureux, TS95 Studios © 2018

  ISBN: 978 0 6481626 2 9 (EPUB)

  ISBN: 978 0 6485444 1 8 (Print)

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  About the Author

  Also by Alyce Caswell

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the laboratory collapsed, spewing equipment and the remnants of the machinery that had kept the platform floating over the soggy ground, Kuja knew who was responsible.

  He sloughed through the mud barefoot, bending down to salvage broken bits and pieces before handing what he found to someone tasked with either writing the item off completely or cleaning and repurposing it. He was just turning around to search for more debris when he was jostled by a woman on a mission — she had swooped over to rescue a techpad before his toes landed on it.

  ‘Creator God help me, that’s six months of work flushed out the airlock!’ Kuja’s companion said, scowling down at a fresh splatter of mud on her form-fitting vinyl pants. Now cradling the damaged techpad against her chest, she rounded on Kuja. ‘What have you people got against TerraCorp, Kuja? The starking lab wasn’t hurting your precious topsoil — it was hovering a whole seven metres above it! You’re lucky Bagaran, your otherwise primitive planet, has a law against murder or we’d have plugged all you sub-level god worshippers with lasbolts by now.’

  Kuja backed away from her, holding up his hands. Though she was a head shorter than him and her flat brown hair was less confronting than his own wiry coppery mess, she still managed to intimidate him. He swallowed. ‘Dr Hackett — Lorena. You cannot blame all of us for the actions of one unhappy person, though he really shouldn’t have done this and I told him — ’

  ‘You told him, did you.’

  Lorena’s blue eyes might have been considered beautiful by some of Kuja’s companions in the village, but like the more senior men and women who actually had a speck of common sense, he thought those eyes were more akin to chasmic ice: deep and dangerously deceptive. Even if he was tempted to find out what Lorena’s lips would feel like against his, he’d seen what his oldest brother had gone through a few years earlier in the name of love and Kuja had no wish to invite that kind of pain and despair into his life.

  Lorena would probably bite him if he ever tried to kiss her anyway.

  ‘Who did this?’ she asked, her voice simmering.

  Kuja grimaced. Due to the mind-reading abilities he had inherited from his father, he knew practically everything that went on inside his rainforests. What he lacked, and badly needed, was the ability to keep his feelings from showing on his face or in his sea-green eyes.

  He linked his hands together to keep them from fidgeting with his khaki shirt and pants ensemble, threadbare not from wear but from his fingers worrying over them. ‘I’m not telling you. You’ll just tell TerraCorp who’ll then get GLEA to turn up with their lasguns.’

  ‘Destruction of someone else’s property is illegal on Bagaran and it’s something the Creator God frowns on!’ Lorena said, crossing her arms. The techpad, ruined though it was, remained clenched in her hand. ‘It’s kinder if I turn the perpetrator over to GLEA than deal with them myself, mark my words. But I suppose if GLEA hides them away in some dingy cell then they can feel the same frustration I am right now!’

  Kuja tore apart the inside of his cheek with his teeth. The Galactic Law Enforcement Agency, if they could spare enough agents, would turn up on lucky — or unlucky, depending on how you felt about the Agency — planets to help enforce the local laws, to assist in capturing criminals and to encourage people to worship their god in return for their services.

  GLEA’s agents had chips in their temples that gave them special powers granted by the Creator God; this was why so many people referred to them as ‘Chippers’. They could use forcefields to generate shields and move objects in a much more basic and laughable form of the telekinesis that some of the sub-level gods enjoyed. While Kuja’s siblings could shrug off the threat GLEA posed, the Chippers were more difficult for him to deal with since he lacked that particular ability. He supposed being the youngest of his brothers and sisters had something to do with that. At least he was able to sense lifesigns at a greater distance than the Chippers could so he always knew when he needed to move further away from them. Their energy had a recognisable taint to it.

  ‘Yes, well, go invite GLEA to Bagaran if you wish,’ Kuja finally said. ‘But I warn you. You’ll lose more than a lab if they show up.’

  ‘That a threat, Kuja?’ Lorena demanded.

  Overhead, a branch snapped. It crashed to the ground beside Lorena and she sprang away, dropping the techpad as she did so, her hand instead finding purchase on her heaving chest.

  Kuja drew a deep breath, calming his temper. ‘A rainforest can be a dangerous place, no matter what cool tech you have at your disposal. Do not forget that Bagaran was renamed in honour of our god, Bagara, and he does not tolerate those who insult or upset his people.’

  ‘I’ll bring GLEA down on you, god or not, you starking — ’

  Lorena’s tirade was cut short when her colleague, a bulky alien woman with several chins and a large triangle-shaped smile, dropped a heavy tentacle onto Lorena’s shoulder and gave her a healthy shove over to where the rest of the TerraCorp scientists were busily scavenging the wreck. Her lipless mouth shrinking into a terse pinprick, the newcomer reminded Lorena that she wasn’t being paid to get into fights with the locals. Lorena didn’t argue, but she banged a fist against her hip as she stormed away, clearly wanting to ram her knuckles into something else.

  ‘Now me, I said to myself when I came here,’ the newcomer began, ‘I said, “Gerns, these people with their weird rainforest god and his mumbo jumbo, they’re gonna cause you problems” and I was right.’ Gerns paused to shake her grey, gelatinous head. She was a Jezlo, a native to the swampy world of Spetnusbani, and unsurprisingly enjoyed the humidity in Bagaran’s rainforests. ‘St
ill, ’least their god doesn’t build temples all over the galaxy and insist everyone worship him.’

  Kuja grinned. ‘No, Bagara just sits around gnashing his teeth and waiting for his enemies to come all the way to Bagaran to single him out for attention.’

  Gerns made a clucking sound that indicated her amusement. She slung one of her six tentacles over Kuja’s shoulders and curled another around his waist as she guided him away to a less boggy patch of ground. They seated themselves on a fallen mossy log where Gerns bathed in the shade for several contented moments. Finally, she said, ‘Kuja. You lot are harmless, mostly. Nothing like the gangs on Yalsa 5 or the water god-worshipping nutjobs on New Sydney who keep blowing up GLEA’s starships, but this is pretty serious. Even if no one got hurt, it’ll set TerraCorp back a fair bit of money.’

  ‘You should bring this up with the village headman,’ Kuja protested. ‘I have no sway here. I’m a stranger, like you.’

  ‘Yeah, but they respect you,’ Gerns said, the suction cups on her tentacles slowly peeling off him. Kuja had never found her touch unpleasant; he knew it was important to Jezlos to communicate their friendship through skin-to-skin contact. ‘And you worship their weird rainforest god, you know what he’s about. So I gotta know. Is this Bagara fellow to blame for the sabotage?’

  Kuja’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, no. Never.’

  ‘Huh, you sound so sure.’

  ‘Well, not sure, just — I’ve thought about it, see.’ Kuja found swallowing difficult so coughed instead to dislodge the lump in his throat. ‘TerraCorp is here to study plant life to use when they next terraform a world. I think Bagara would be pleased with a company that creates more rainforests. If he lets them continue their work, he’ll have even more planets under his control.’

  ‘But the rest of his people don’t agree with your thinking, I take it,’ Gerns said, her massive head wobbling in the direction of the villagers who had come down to watch the TerraCorp employees clean up the mess that had once been a laboratory. The scientists looked filthy and out of place in their once-white garb whereas the villagers, in their array of brown and beige cotton, seemed more at ease with the setting.

  ‘I won’t deny it.’ Kuja sighed. ‘Some see it as stealing. Or insulting Bagara. Or even invasion. We don’t have a temple or any worshippers of the Creator God here and many of your scientists come from worlds that do. I would understand if my companions are worried that TerraCorp means to bring GLEA here.’

  ‘So it is a religious thing.’ Gerns’ tentacles straightened and shook, a sure sign of the Jezlo’s irritation. ‘Now me, I think that just because the Creator God and Bagara don’t play in the same sandbox it doesn’t mean their kids can’t.’

  ‘Why would you assume that the gods don’t, ah, play together?’

  Gerns bent one tentacle towards the destruction. ‘Kuja, if they were playing together, wouldn’t this Bagara fellow jump out and tell his folks not to mess with followers of the Creator God?’

  ‘Free will is a common theme among the galaxy’s religions, though — no god, sub-level or Creator, can make us do anything, and that includes being nice to each other,’ Kuja argued, shrinking on the log and hoping the streaks of mud on his face were enough to hide his embarrassment at having to defend himself, no matter how abstractly. ‘So…so Bagara can’t make people do things.’

  ‘Free will costs time and money and it might even cost me my job.’ Gerns stood, her trembling tentacles now aimed at the gathered villagers. ‘Kuja. Get this fixed. I don’t like GLEA’s agents any more than you do, always sticking their supposedly not-for-profit noses into places they’re not invited, but if I have to call them, I will.’

  As she plodded away, Kuja rested his chin in his hand, brooding. He glanced down when a vine reached up to tap his arm, asking if it could spend the day coiled around his waist since he clearly needed some comfort. Kuja shook his head. ‘No, my friend. I will be fine.’

  He rose from the log, leaving the dejected vine behind, and headed up the path towards Bagath, the village where he lived as a mortal. Once he was inside the palisade walls, he spent some time checking the generators responsible for powering the shield that protected the village against predators at night. It took him a while to realise that what he could smell wasn’t decaying food matter in the compost heap (it was on the opposite side of Bagath, after all), but himself. Kuja winced. He really could use a wash. And he didn’t want to give the visiting TerraCorp scientists the impression that he and the villagers were backwards or primitive.

  He envied his beloved rainforests. They didn’t need to worry about how they looked and nor did they need to remember which name they were supposed to be wearing at any given time. It was exhausting. He was called Kuja by those closest to him, designated as the Rforine in the Galactic Pantheon and referred to as Bagara by the complete strangers who worshipped him.

  Sometimes he wondered if lying to the villagers in Bagath and pretending to be one of them was forgivable, but he always reminded himself that it helped him to understand them better. Other times he was afraid that living like a mortal would invite the wrath of his godly brothers and sisters. So far it seemed his life here hadn’t upset the grand design because they hadn’t yet come after him.

  But he was always looking over his shoulder.

  • • •

  The new communal showers were a chrome eyesore beside Bagath, but they were so useful that no one complained that TerraCorp hadn’t found a more aesthetically pleasing shape to drop outside the village gate. It also helped that the Bagathians had been told they could use the showers free of charge. It was a placating gesture, one meant to engender goodwill. How much longer TerraCorp would allow the showers to remain open after the lab’s destruction was anyone’s guess.

  The frosted glass door whooshed open for Kuja as he approached it, allowing him to make his way through the misty air to the locker he always used. He shed his soiled pants as he went and binned them. The shirt he could probably keep — the hole wasn’t that big and he could always patch it up later. He never wore boots, so there was no need to squeeze a pair of them into the small locker along with his clothes.

  Kuja leaned his head against the door of the locker, enjoying the caress of cool metal against his skin, but it did nothing to dispel his dark mood.

  What is the point of living forever, he thought, when you must do it alone?

  The towel dangling from his hand dragged on the floor as Kuja shuffled over to the shower area, where someone else had already switched on one of the thundering water jets. He threw his towel onto a nearby rack, beside the fluffy blue one hanging there, and stepped beneath his own jet. It burst into life within moments, shooting hot water over him. He winced and adjusted the temperature. His lips went numb in under a minute but the icy spray seemed to be helping him clear his mind of the unwelcome desires that had flooded into it earlier.

  ‘You can’t wash away the guilt, you know.’ Lorena’s voice cracked through the room. ‘You might as well just tell me who did it.’

  Kuja’s head snapped up in surprise. Flinging her hair out of her face, Lorena gave him a long, lingering look filled with so much heat it could have stripped the skin from his bones. Kuja glanced down at himself, then back at her similarly nude form.

  ‘Erm,’ he said and started side-walking to his towel.

  ‘What in the Creator God’s…’ She trailed off, then burst out laughing. ‘Kuja, are you embarrassed? I thought you rainforest folk showered together all the time.’

  Tightly binding the towel around his midsection, Kuja glowered at her. ‘We do. But my fellow Bagathians don’t keep interrogating me about things I had no part in. And they don’t look at me as you just did.’

  Lorena planted her hands on her hips and arched her back. Her glistening breasts rose for his inspection. ‘Maybe I haven’t been very clear. I like the look of you, Kuja. At first I thought you were being coy, then I realised you didn’t even notice I was playing with you.’
/>
  Kuja stumbled backwards, nearly tripping on the tiled steps leading up and out the shower area. His feet slipped around for several more agonising seconds until they found purchase on the rubber matting that was designed to keep such accidents from occurring. Lorena remained right where she was, watching him.

  Kuja cleared his throat. ‘Well, no, I don’t…I don’t tend to notice the women around me.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked, holding her hand beneath a soap dispenser. It spat suds into her palm which she then began lathering down her chest. ‘Would you prefer a man?’

  Kuja actually had to think about that one. He shrugged. ‘I, erm, don’t know.’

  The soap slid between her breasts, gliding further south. Kuja averted his eyes.

  ‘So what’s your glitch, Kuja?’ Lorena asked.

  ‘Apart from you threatening to bring GLEA down on us barely an Old Earth hour ago?’ he demanded. His gaze had somehow found its way back to her.

  ‘I might forget about doing that, if someone wanted to give me the right incentive,’ Lorena said, her hands now roving liberally over her form.

  Kuja sighed heavily. ‘Lorena, I don’t have…well, I do have the time for this, I just don’t want to do it. In my experience, getting involved with mort — with women has never done my family any good.’

  Lorena rolled her eyes. ‘What, your brother have a nasty ex or something? Relationships are always messy. Deal with it. And it’s not like we need to get involved, Kuja. We can just fuck.’

  Kuja felt the rainforest outside Bagath immediately respond to his inner turmoil. Vines knotted, branches swayed, soil writhed and rocks began to unearth themselves, quaking, restless, desperate to carve their way into new territory.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Kuja said and strode back to his locker.

  When he made it outside, fully dressed and back in the pants he’d rescued from the bin, his breaths were short and sharp. He struggled to reassure the rainforests on several different planets that he was alright, that he didn’t need their assistance. They were sceptical, but they dutifully quietened.