Kenneth was a big, beautiful scorpion – six hundred tons if he was a gram, with a lovely red carapace that made the haemolymph of his opponents splash most attractively against it. Jarleen had ridden him to victory in six races and two grand championships and the noise he made as his mouth foamed and his legs folded under him and his brain shut off was a very small and disappointed ‘thhht,’ more fitting of a distressed dockyard guard-spider than a mighty steed.
“Fuck,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient. “Fuck fuck.” Half a league from the finishing line and down a mount with no backups. “Fuck fuck fuck.” And the trap had been poison, which had needed time to work its way through Kenneth’s system, which had needed to be timed during a pit stop, which meant the race officials were compromised. “FUCK.”
“Why do you swear as you assault that dead beast so?”
Jarleen looked at her hands and looked at what was in them and looked at the stranger (stocky, squinty, strange) and discovered that she was correct, as entirely without planning to she had seized up her goad and begun thwacking Kenneth in what had formerly been the tenderest section of his exoskeleton.
“I’m a half-hour ahead on a sixteen hour race and some scumfuckering bribetaking pissshitting fuckbitchassmotherwhore killed my mount with doped food,” she explained primly. “Now please stay back because I can’t guarantee my aim at the moment.”
“Oh, you need a new ride?” asked the stranger. She scratched aimlessly at the sun—boils on her arm, which were the ripe round red of someone who’d spent too much time on the old hiways where the sun rolled off the rotted metal roofs of the motorcars. “I sell rides.”
“The Southern Eldland Grand Loop is only open to skyscraper-class scorpions,” said Jarleen.
“And hey, that’s what I sell,” said the stranger, offering her scratching hand – still flaked with dead skin under the nails. “My name’s Moth. Let’s talk titanturkey, shall we?”
***
Moth’s Used Scorpions was a scrap of worn cloth serving as both tent and banner stretched between a pair of Eld-age streetlamps. Underneath it was a rock (her chair) a cooler (her lunch and her safe) and a telescope (for spotting clients).
Moth offered Jarleen half her lunch. It had been a long time since her last meal and a random stranger was at this point less likely to poison her than any of the professionals at the pit stops, so Jarleen took the bottle and drank stale fermented grain as she was shown the first scorpion, lurking patiently in the shadowed and empty-eyed bulk of an Eld building that very nearly stood taller than he did.
“This is Billy. Good shape, gently used, young enough to have tons of energy and not so young as to be thin in the carapace. A bit plain in his patterning, but a working jockey’ll care less about that than results, right?”
“The ‘casters don’t shut up about it, but yes.”
Billy rustled gently beneath them, mandibles flexing, and Jarleen sighed. “Close. Very close. But absolutely not. He’s got no right pincher.”
“And he makes good use of his left!”
“Nine times out of ten that’s the side you get passed on in the last league. He’s as useless to me as if he had no legs. Pass.”
“C’mon, you’re in no position to be choosey,” protested Moth.
“Unless you’ve only got the one scorpion, I suspect I am. Who’s next?”
Next was Newman. He brooded low in the shade of a collapsed overpass, the skeletal remains of his meals delicately picked-dry around his den-mouth.
“Two pinchers, see, that’ll do you,” said Moth, accepting her lunch back and shotgunning the dregs of the bottle with a loud crunching sound. “And believe you me, he’s fierce enough with them. Almost got my leg two days ago.”
“I can deal with feisty,” said Jarleen. “Call him out.”
“Pardon?”
“Let’s see his pace.”
Moth sighed and put her fingers to her teeth and shrieked a harsh note that shook the dust from the deadest windows of the Eld buildings, and Newman bestirred and slowly, gently eeled his way loose to investigate.
Jarleen sighed.
“Hey, he still has two pinchers! I told you!”
“You told me. He also has no legs. You didn’t tell me that.”
“He gets around pretty good for someone with no legs, I’d like to see you do any better.”
“I wouldn’t do worse. And I wouldn’t win this race. Do you have any others?”
Moth shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m a bit light on stock.”
“Anything. Anything at all.”
“Alright, alright.” Moth shrugged once more – a great heave of flexion from shoulder to wrist – and pulled her hand from her pocket.
“That’s a beetle.”
“So it is.”
“That is NOT a scorpion.”
“You said anything at all, what the hell more do you want?”
“A scorpion!” screamed Jarleen. “An honest to god skyscraper-class scorpion that can run a race and defend itself and beyond that I don’t care if it’s on the verge of death or a barely-hatched skitterling with wobbly legs! Hell, at this point I don’t care if all you’ve got is a female – I’d take her so long as she had the restraint to not eat me or the officials until the race is over!”
Moth drew her palm across her brow, smearing fresh dust on old grease. “Alright, alright, alright. Fine. I didn’t want to do this, but fine. I’ve got a personal favourite, see. His name is Tyler and he’s been with me through thick and thin and helped capture half my stock. But you’re in a hurry, and you’re in need, and you know what? The old boy deserves one last moment of glory.”
“We’ll see,” said Jarleen.
***
Tyler stood twenty-two meters at the apex.
Tyler’s pinchers were meticulously honed to razors.
Tyler’s tail was the pleasantly-plump sheen you got when a scorpion was flush with venom.
Tyler’s carapace was a lovely thick black without even so much as flecks or mottles of light – no wonder Moth had caught others with him; on a moonless night, he would be invisible despite all his majesty.
Tyler was also stone dead.
“He was happy as a clam an hour ago,” said Moth in tears. “Ate his cow like a good boy and everything. Oh Tyler! You were old, but I thought we’d have more time together! Oh Tyler! Why?! Anyways that’s the lot, who’ll it be?”
Jarleen swallowed the primal words at the back of her throat. “What?”
“Who’ll you take?”
“Between them all, you have one barely-functioning scorpion.”
“So why not just ride ‘em in turns?” said Moth in that infuriating tone of voice that dared suggest she thought she was being very reasonable.
“One mount per racer,” said Jarleen, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth with perfect care. “Just one at a time. Wait. Wait wait wait.”
“Yeah?”
“Hold on a moment.”
“Yeah?”
“Have you fed your stock today besides Tyler?”
“Yeah?”
“FUCK-“
“No wait no I mean no, sorry. Was just fixing to when you showed up and I got distracted.”
Jarleen stared at Tyler’s big dead body.
“I’ll take all three of them.”
“Which three?”
“The SCORPIONS, YOU-” and then Jarleen thought about it. “All of them. All four of them. Give me that beetle this second; I need to chew on something.”
***
“A beautiful beast,” said the ‘caster into his microphone. “Lovely black carapace on him, quite glorious. And a real bruiser – look at the strain on his skin from all that packed-in muscle and mass; god, he must be about fit to shed soon! You said you found him at a roadside used-scorpion shop?”
“Yes,” said Jarleen in her trademark manner, which seventeen articles in seventeen periodicals had described as classy-yet-efficient and which she now found herself wishing was more focused on pure bullshitting.
“Quite a lucky find. I wasn’t aware there were any along the Southern Eldland Loop!”
“There aren’t any more,” said Jarleen. “It was a closing-out sale. Just barely made it for exchanging the cost of my old mount.”
“You know,” said the ‘caster thoughtfully into the long, smooth silence, “I’ve never seen a three-pinchered scorpion before.”
“He’s an exotic,” said Jarleeen. “Common in his species.”
“What species?”
“Western Mojave Turrduken.”
The ‘caster waited for an explanation.
“So,” he said at last, “can we expect to see more of…”
“Tylerbillyman.”
“…Tylerbillyman?”
“Absolutely not. They- HE – is. Are. Very tired. Elderly and a bit overfed. HE deserves retirement.”
“Sad to see a dark horse like that leave, but it only adds to the mystique I suppose. You know, he did the work of three mounts out there today.”
“Yes,” said Jarleen. And she left, before she admitted anything else.