When the Piranha Belle docks in the port of Belém Immersa, private security is necessary to beat back the crowd. With three tiers of wraparound decks and four gleaming coats of crimson and cream paint, the riverboat is a rare beauty—and that’s before the onlookers get wind of her vintage gaming tables, her triple-locked cash box, her elusive captain. One overeager newsman dodges the bodyguards and goes in search of her; his own holosheet reports him missing the next morning.
At precisely ten to five, a murmur of evening dresses and tailcoats in Old Earth styles swishes up the gangplank, owners carefully tugging hems and heels out of the dust. The Piranha Belle is billed as the jewel of this former continent, now a graveyard of rivers. Accordingly, her passengers are connoisseurs of empire: cobalt barons, ethanol magnates, owners of asteroid mines.
Picture the casino hall, its lush vermillion velvets and mirrored columns, its parquet ceilings and wedding-cake chandeliers. Glittering skeins of champagne unspool from dark bottles in the hands of silent, unsmiling attendants. A fountain brims over with enormous petals of indigo and white, the blossoms of the last mburucuyá, sourced from a Venusian greenhouse at incredible expense. Hear the rattle of the roulette wheel, the flirtatious rustle of cards, the discreet chirps of extinct wildlife piped in.
When the Piranha Belle glides away from shore, she is propelled by silent machinery across the spectral murk that passes for water. The passengers ooh and aah as they sail leisurely down the ghost river, past abandoned grain silos and ruined villages. They sigh as they flip through glossy, tastefully written brochures about the former Amazon basin. They gasp whenever the darkness ripples and parts around a new curiosity—eels crackling with blue sparks, caimans bloated with bizarre growths, moon-eyed drought-mermaids dragging themselves along with skeletal limbs.
“Don’t suppose they’re classified as legal bounty, are they?” One of the magnates leans against the bar, gazing longingly at the sludge where the mermaids crawl. He wears boots of arapaima scales. On his arm is a woman draped in emeralds and capybara furs.
“No, sir,” says the bartender. Her hands move over her taps like shadows on a rainforest floor. Unlike the Piranha Belle’s waiters in their white gloves and gray waistcoats, the bartender does speak, but in a bored drawl. She’s learned that the more hostile her golden-eyed stare, the more chips will clink into her tip jar, black as starmatter or platinum as fishbone.
“Hm! I wanted one for my curio vault.” His mouth twists. He already has the pelt of an albino jaguar, the skull of a Guaraní revolutionary, and the fossil of an ancient whale; this loss displeases him. “I’ll have to settle for a dolphin.”
“What about her?” whispers his companion, pressing a bejeweled hand to her throat. “When do we get to see her?” The bartender shrugs.
“Depends how high you bet.” Her lips curl back from her teeth. “You might get lucky.”
The night slinks on, a dancer in a midnight dress. The heiress to the Triton conglomerate is caught in the coat room with two disaster photojournalists from rival media outlets. The governor of the outer galaxy bets a hundred thousand on the wheel, wins double, and loses triple that on his next spin. In a secret room behind the sculpture of a smiling conquistador—a room accessed only by a password, a bribe, and the tooth of a rival in love—a man in a suit of vicuña wool runs a private table. Here, the stakes are written, sealed, and signed with blood.
“Again,” is all he says, a pale dread ghost in black, when the pile of chips in front of him is swept away. Instead of tapping his glass, he taps the thigh of the girl on his lap, her brown wrists studded around with pinprick diamonds like manacles grown into the skin. Her blank eyes hardly move. “I’m good for it.”
Belowdecks, in her quarters where the lamps are low, the captain stirs.
The Piranha Belle has been well named. Her guests have sought out the rumors with fascination, but also a certain amount of scorn. The piranha queen is the last of her kind, they have been told, but a queen who is permitted to rule by others’ mercy is not a real queen at all. She is simply another novelty.
The captain dresses to oblige her guests’ thirst for pageantry. She dons a frock coat of silver sequins, scattering flecks of light wherever she walks. Beneath it she wears a waistcoat of pure deep scarlet, the color of peeled flesh. Her dark hair is bound back with gold-washed fishing line, baring a somewhat protrusive jaw. As the finishing touch, above a pair of enormous amber eyes (an unkind observer might call them bulging), the piranha queen sets a crown of teeth upon her brow.
The crew dim the lights to announce her approach. An impatient hush falls over the room. The bartender rolls her eyes and stops wiping glasses. The gurgle of the fountain stills. Only the man in the black suit moves unchecked, fingers tracking down his captive’s back.
When the piranha queen finally appears, her audience explodes with applause. Cameras flash. Journalists wrestle with similes. High rollers roar out their top bets. Ladies turn and whisper to one another about her ashen skin, her overblown pupils. One countess pretends to faint, and is much inconvenienced when her husband actually does.
Then, little by little, the thunderous ovation fades into a bewildered outrage. The piranha queen doesn’t speak to anyone. She doesn’t even look their way. Trailing a murmur of disappointment in her wake, she treads down the long room and toward the conquistador statue, vanishing behind it.
“Well!” hisses the woman in the capybara furs. “I never!” She smacks her escort with her clutch. “You should have bet the skull after all, you selfish hog.”
The attendants are quick to open more champagne, but the mood has soured. Bettors slap their cards down with ill will. As accusations of cheating erupt, collars are grabbed, shoulders shoved, and glasses hoisted precariously out of the fray.
“What the hell is that sound?” cries the curio hunter, shirt sopping with whiskey.
The bartender sighs and moves the expensive liquor underneath the bar.
From the room behind the statue, a gunshot cracks. A girl’s scream shatters the air. Yet these noises are secondary to the sound that precedes, outlasts, engulfs them: a guttural hum like the thudding of a drum.
It is the triumphant cry of the piranha queen. And it is the sound that pulses in the swelling throats of the Piranha Belle’s attendants, who have stripped off their white gloves, who are smiling very wide at their guests for the first time.
The piranha queen, you see, never travels alone.
When the frenzy of the shoal is done, the bartender halfheartedly pulls tablecloths over the worst of the carnage. There isn’t much left to cover. When she strolls out to the top deck the piranha queen is there, and so is the girl with the diamond wrists, watching the drought-mermaids and caimans feast on the scraps far below.
It has begun to rain—softly for now, but the promise of thunder rolls across the sky.
“I still want to keep the tips.” The bartender shakes the rain from her hair with distinctly feline dislike. The riverboat’s lanterns cast uneven rosettes of shadow upon her skin. “Do you have somewhere to go back to, little one?”
“I don’t know,” whispers the girl, watching her wrists sparkle in the hazy glow of the lamps. “My great-grandparents’ village was here. That’s why he picked me for this trip. He wanted me to see what had been done to it—to us.”
“It’s a long river.” The bartender leans against the railing. “I’m sure we can find a job opening while you figure it out. I’m an independent contractor, myself.”
“They told me it hardly rained here anymore,” says the girl. “That nothing was left except the ghost river. Except what could live in the dust.”
“We have not been eradicated yet,” replies the piranha queen, and in her strange low growl the words are as much a promise as the thunder. When the wind picks up, the girl turns her face gladly into it, into the damp that wets her cheeks.
“Storm’s coming,” notes the bartender, unnecessarily. “Let’s get you a room.”
“Yes,” says the piranha queen. “It is a long way between here and Manaus Novissima. And if any late ticket holders plan to join us along the way—” Her jaw moves. “It will be hungry work.”
And the Piranha Belle swims on down the river, vanishing into the mist that rises and the rain that falls, crimson and cream and pleased and secret, like a grin on the face of the night.