Coal sighed. He hadn’t wanted to burden Zank, one of his few friends—maybe his only actual friend—with this information. This monumental mess of his. Upon his arrival in Vinnag, he had explained to Zank that he’d run into some trouble up in Muta Par and needed to lay low for a while, but did not elaborate any further.
Before he could explain, Zank stood and fetched himself a bottle of beer from the cooler. He pointed it toward Coal, but he declined again. Zank stood by the table and said, “Let’s go outside. I don’t wanna disturb V.”
Coal looked at her over on the couch, her arm wrapped up as best they could manage, and sympathized.
“I don’t want to either,” he said, “but this isn’t really something that I would want out in the open air, you know?”
Zank thought it over for a moment. He then popped the top off his bottle and took a pull, licking his lips as he swallowed.
“We’ll just have to keep quiet then, huh?” he said, heading for the door. He paused, then said quietly, “Last chance for a beer.”
Coal shook his head and followed the rabbit outside. His stomach twisted.
Crickets chirruped outside, intermingling with the buzz of nearby streetlamps. Coal followed Zank down a staircase into the apartment courtyard, where Zank sat himself down at a community table. He tapped the bottom of his glass bottle on the table as he waited for Coal to take a seat.
“Kinda out in the open,” said Coal uneasily. His eyes darted back and forth in search of anyone else who happened to be out for a nighttime stroll. It was pretty late, so it seemed unlikely, but still better to practice caution.
Zank shrugged. “It’s fine. Whisper and no one’ll hear you but me.”
His tone was grave. Coal had never seen the rabbit act so serious before. He wondered precisely what sort of history Zank and Venny shared.
Coal took one last look around the empty courtyard before relenting and sitting down at the table. Zank had set his bottle down and was drumming his fingernails against the bare, label-less side of it, the soft clink joining the cacophony of crickets and lightbulbs.
It was difficult to find a place to start. The situation was daunting, and messy, and impossible.
Zank sat staring at him expectantly, tapping away on his glass. Coal wished he’d stop and take a drink instead. Give his ears some peace.
He scratched the bridge of his snout and sighed.
“Go on, then,” said Zank. He took a swig of the beer.
Coal pushed himself to take that momentary silence as an opening. “So, when I got here, I told you that I needed some low-profile work. Nothing official, nothing on the books. Nothing that required paperwork of any sort.”
“Mhm,” Zank grumbled, licking his lips again. “Garna-type work.”
“Yes,” Coal nodded. “I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that between all the city’s Garnas, I could stay employed for as long as I needed.”
“Until you were dead, probably,” Zank said with a smirk. “Very few of the Garnas would take kindly to you working with the others against their own interests. Hell, I’m not sure if there’s even one who’d be okay with that. Nomak certainly wouldn’t.”
“Right, well, I wasn’t being literal,” said Coal.
He took a breath, recognizing that he was stalling. He still didn’t know exactly how much of the truth he should reveal to his friend.
He said, “I was still living in Muta Par before this. I never left. You know I was never the biggest fan of my father, we were never particularly close or anything. But he was getting up there in age, then with his injury and all, even when I had opportunities to leave I stuck around to help him out.”
“Von Ereness was not my biggest fan,” Zank grinned. “Your dad hated me.”
Coal laughed. “That’s true,” he said.
“Ah! So you finally admit it.”
“Well, you were always causing trouble when you visited! Stealing, vandalizing, just generally causing a ruckus—and you always got his sweet, beautiful boy wrapped up in it.”
Zank guffawed. Coal was glad to see him loosening up a bit.
“Yeah, yeah,” said the rabbit. “His sweet, beautiful boy was the one coming up with the designs we were painting on the sides of those buildings.”
“Those designs were all just some swear words or two people fucking or someone taking a shit or something,” said Coal. “As fellow teenagers, I think one of you would’ve gotten there eventually. Even without me.”
“Whatever. Innocent you were not.”
“Hey, all my troublemaking stopped once you were gone…” He trailed off, letting the insinuation linger.
Zank was still grinning, but he said, “Get on with the story.”
Coal tried to go on, but stopped. “I…” He struggled with what to omit. He said, “There was…an accident. My father and I were both involved. It was a huge deal, and…he died.”
Zank’s ears flattened. “Shit,” he said. “Sorry.”
Coal’s heart started racing as he imagined himself back there in Muta Par. Seeing his father with his—
“Long story short,” he blurted out, wanting to erase the image from his mind, “it looked like I killed him.” His voice hitched as he said it. “Which is untrue, obviously, but that’s what it looked like.”
That was as much detail as Zank was going to get. Coal couldn’t find it in himself to say any more, nor did he want Zank wrapped up in this more than he needed to be. He was already doing Coal an enormous favor by hooking him up with jobs to earn enough money to sustain himself. He didn’t want to repay that by getting his friend in deep trouble with the Palace.
His friend remained silent, processing the information. His long ears slowly perked back up.
“I tried explaining myself to the officers who found us, but they wouldn’t listen,” Coal continued. “They didn’t care. In their eyes, they had orders from the Dirt King, a job they had to do, circumstances be damned. So I bolted. Ran straight out of Muta Par, couldn’t even stop to grab anything from my apartment. Just kept running all through the night. Nearly died of exhaustion out in the forest.”
It wasn’t far from the truth. In fact, none of it was a lie, but it was only the broad strokes version of the story.
And no mention of the ghost.
The ghost was definitely a complication he did not want to burden Zank with.
That was all in his head, anyway. He was better now, he assured himself.
“Shit,” Zank muttered again. “When was this?”
“A little over a year ago. Brightmonth last year,” Coal answered. “I’ve just been making my way south the entire time. I knew you were here and that maybe you could help me out.”
“Because you knew I was a shady bastard.”
“Well, I mean,” Coal grinned. “My father had a feeling about you.”
Zank jokingly rolled his eyes before his expression turned serious. “That’s fucked,” was all he said, and Coal was thankful the man did not want him to expand on the story. “So the guys with those robots were trying to arrest you?”
Coal nodded. “They’re called Stingers. The Palace sends them out for people they consider to be highly dangerous.”