Bad Habit's Arc

Chapter 6 of 10

Bad Habit followed the moving air deeper into the dark. The tunnel forked. Two mouths yawned ahead, both black, both breathing. He crouched and licked his thumb. The air pulled left, faint. Then it shifted right. He could not tell which passage carried Slither's scent. Pick wrong and the snake would reach his gang. Pick wrong and Bad Habit would face a whole crew alone. He let the sprites loose. They scattered into both forks, wrenches raised. One squealed from the left. Bad Habit ran that way and lost the trail in a third branch. He stopped, chest heaving. The tunnels were a maze built to break a hunter. He was losing. Then a red glow rose from the stone floor. A fruit sat wedged in a crack, and it lifted on its own. Its skin burned like a coal wrapped in gold lines. Marks he could not read crawled across it. Bad Habit froze. His phone buzzed. Bingo, his childhood friend, the only one who saw the dragon under his boy's face. "You still breathing down there?" Bingo's voice was tight. "I felt something wake up in the tunnels. Something old." "I'm looking at it," Bad Habit said. The fruit drifted toward him, slow, like it had chosen him. "A fruit. It's glowing." Bingo went quiet. Then: "Don't just stare at it, fool. Some of those grant power. Some kill you." The fruit touched Bad Habit's palm and sank warmth into his arm. His whole body hummed. Pictures flooded his head. He saw himself as a rat, as a stone, as a snake with yellow eyes. The knowing settled in his bones. He could become anything now. "I felt that," Bingo breathed. "What did it give you?" Bad Habit smiled. His golden teeth caught the fruit's last light. "A new door." He shut his eyes and pictured King Slither. His skin cooled and slid. His arms shrank to a green body. His black clothes hung loose, then reshaped. When he opened his eyes, they sat lower to the ground. A tail swept the stone behind him. He tasted the air with a forked tongue. Now every scent was clear. Slither's trail glowed in his mind like a bright thread through the maze. It ran down the right fork, past the third branch, deep toward the base. "I've got him," Bad Habit hissed. His own voice came out wrong, a snake's rasp. He gathered the sprites into his coat and poured himself into the right tunnel, fast and low. He reached a wide chamber. Snake gang guards lined the walls. They saw one of their own slide in and did not raise a weapon. Bad Habit passed between them, unseen for what he was. King Slither stood at the far end, hissing orders, his gang whole around him. The air current had lied to him. The fruit had not. Bad Habit was inside now, wearing his enemy's face, standing in the heart of the snake's home. Bad Habit laughs to himself