Excerpt: Nadir

Staring into my empty bottle, I pondered as to whether you could make alcohol out of pineapples. I’m not talking about a fruit wine or something silly like that; I’m talking about a proper hard liquor. I’m not a homeless drunk, though. Homeless, yes, which is why I was curled up in a park corner in a huge brown coat, but drunk, no. The bottle was sparkling water, which I’d conned from a waiter in one of the local hotels. And there’s worse places to be homeless than Hawai’i.

But Honolulu in itself was horribly lacking the fresh-water department for the feckless and absocnding, unless you wanted to drink from one of the many fountains or try and steal fresh water from the barrels at the docks or the huge cisterns by the airship landings, but those were up in the mountains. And that required effort.

So that was why I was staring into the bottle, looking like your typical drunk, in a corner of the park. And I had just found the last few drops in the bottle, shaking it to try to wiggle them together to make a mouthful, when there was a shimmer in the air. It was like the feeling you get when a beautiful woman walks by, one you know that unless you’re a very smooth talker you’ll never have a chance to get with. Or when a gorgeous ship pulls into dock. Or an especially shiny airship tethers.

Smoke wafted through the air, from the group that always gathers at the corner opposite the one I thought of as mine. I’m not sure what they smoked, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. It was as if a voice echoed from the heavens, chanting something strange and foreign, though that could have just been Crazy Ben. And the kid walked towards me, striding like a cat, silent and smooth, but with a power that only comes when you control all your limbs. I glanced around to see if there was anyone else nearby. He didn’t look like one of those gang kids, that group that were as much on the street as the rest of us, but followed one bloke and beat up on the rest of us. He looked like a cotton bud that had been dipped in motor oil, and he was smiling.

“Excuse me,” he said, crouching to address me face-to-face, “but would you happen to know who I am?”