Stormbringer Read Free Page B

was selling off the old shit, the coal. BHP and Oceanid were fucking lapping it up, the suckers. I cut whatever I had to to finance these two smartass kids and their fucking dream.”
    “Everyone thought you were crazy,” Sigmund says. He’s heard this part of the story, too. Seen the made-for-TV movie, even.
    “The board kept trying no confidence,” I say. “Shit like that. It was a ruthless fucking time.”
    “But you won.”
    I nod, swirling the wine inside my glass, smelling the peaches and the oak. “I won,” I say. “Eventually.”
    “ ‘The Purges,’ right?” Not my choice of name, and I still wince to hear it.
    “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, it was—anyone who wasn’t with the new program? They were gone. Their shit tossed out onto the street overnight, some of them. It was brutal, but we did what we did.”
    Coal is a finite resource, there’s only so much of it buried in the ground. But the future? The future is forever, always.
    “And now we have these.” Sigmund’s holding up his phone—his Pyre Flame—and giving something like a grin. “This is what you felt? The day when everyone walked around with their own computer, stuffed into their pocket.”
    I close my eyes, breathe, and
feel.
    “No,” I say eventually. “Not this. This is still the journey. We’re not at the destination. Not yet.”
    The future is not now.
    But it will be. One day.
    —
    By the time the duck arrives, Sigmund discovers a furious need to piss, care of the wine. He manages to make it to the bathroom and back with only a minimum of staggering.
    When he returns, he leans forward across the table and says, voice not quite a whisper, “Man, I’m pretty drunk.”
    “It’s a lot of wine,” I say. About a bottle each, and that’s assuming the waiters weren’t being generous with the pouring, which they were. “It’s normal. Drink some water.” Sigmund isn’t much of a drinker, is the guy who’ll spend an entire evening nursing a single Corona until it goes flat and warm.
    “This food is really nice.”
    “I know,” I say, grinning around my duck. Then, the dangerous confession: “It’s a weakness, mortal food. One of the many things I don’t miss about home.”
    Sigmund blinks at the comment, then takes a guess: “You mean in Asgard?” His pronunciation is still terrible.
    I nod. “An eternity of charred goat and apples and skyr.”
    “ ‘Skyr’?”
    “Viking yogurt.”
    “Oh.” Sigmund peers at his plate, trying to identify what he can of the ingredients. After a moment, he gives up, and instead says: “You don’t talk about Asgard very much.”
    It’s not posing a question so much as it is seeking an invitation to ask one. I make a noncommittal noise in reply. “There’s not very much to talk about,” I lie. “I wasn’t there, then I was, and now I’m not again.” Sigmund winces at the aggressive not-truthiness of these statements.
    “You don’t miss it?”
    “No,” I say, maybe too quickly. If this one’s a lie, Sigmund is the only one of us who can tell. I don’t ask him for clarification.
    “Then why are you going back?” Sigmund does not look at me when he asks it, eyes focused on his own plate with ferocious intensity.
    Ah. Yes. That.
    There’s a long, horrible moment where I don’t know what to say. I fill it with a sip of wine. Sigmund scarfs a potato. As he’s chewing, I say, “Because.” Then can’t think of anything else.
    “ ‘Because’?” he quotes back.
    “Because.”
    This earns me a scowl, thick clotted waves of red-brown concern oozing from Sigmund’s Wyrd. “Lain…” he starts.
    Here’s the thing. I both haven’t been to Ásgarðr for a millennium and was just there two months ago. That’s the downside of being two people at once. As Lain-Loki, I’m exiled from the place, presumed dead. As Loki-Baldr, I’m the goddamn king of it. This is what is commonly known as a “loose end.” In this case, said loose end has a physical embodiment