One Day in a Small-Town Desert, chapter 4, page 6

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Bhanar Narak awoke to agonizing pain. His legs were broken again. Without moving, he mentally checked his body. Through the waves of pain, or rather because of them, he could feel his left shin broken just below the knee. The smaller leg bone was intact, but probably pulled from the joint. His right shin had snapped further down. The thin bone had broken, too. He could feel cold air inside his leg, where the bones had torn up through his skin.

Plague of Rékaré, he thought. Why’d I have to do that? When he’d broken his legs sky jumping, it had been an accident. The parachutes hadn’t opened fully, so he hit the ground plagued hard. When he’d broken his arm motorbike racing, that had been an accident. A competitor had bumped into him and they both went flying. When he’d broken that same arm another time, it was an accident, too. He’d tripped on the edge of a rug. But this--now this was just Koro-head stupidity. That old geezer had never done anything for him, so why had he saved the Sorosotuzho?

Close by, Pí‘oro said, “Thank you, son,” and some other words Bhanar didn’t understand.

Without turning his head or even opening his eyes, Bhanar cracked open his mouth and replied, “Welcome.”

In an annoyingly calm voice, the old man gave unintelligible directions to Bhanar.

“I don’t understand.” Bhanar paused to formulate the next sentence in the Sarıman language. “My legs are break.”

If that bastard Zhíno had really been the one who shot at Bhanar in the first place, like Fírí had said, why did he try to run over Pí‘oro? Surely he had seen Bhanar standing there. Surely he had seen Bhanar shoot him in the hand. If Zhíno was trying to kill the plagued Koro-head emperor, he was certainly going about it in a strange way.

Or maybe the blonde woman had been lying. Maybe it was the blonde who was trying to kill Bhanar for being the supposed emperor, and he had kept her at bay with his rifle when she came back to finish him off.

Whoever it was that shot at him, Bhanar wanted him or her dead. Surely all the worlds knew that Bhanar didn’t want anything to do with being the fake emperor. Surely he had shoved enough microphones out of his face when the plagued reporters stopped asking questions about his racing and started asking Koro-head questions about what he would change in the worlds if he was in charge. Never mind that there was no plagued empire anymore. Never mind that his grandfather’s empire only covered a few of the smaller worlds in the solar system. Never mind any of that. The Tara-fucking reporters certainly didn’t care about it.

The reporters could all die, too. The reporters, the cameramen, the idiots in the worlds who lapped it all up; this Zhíno bastard, the Tara-fucking blonde woman, and condescending Pí‘oro; and especially Bhanar’s pretentious, overbearing, rich-without-working-at-it father could all die horrible deaths, for all Bhanar cared.

No, he did care. Bhanar was lying on a gravel driveway in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country on a different planet, with two horribly broken legs and no one even trying to help him. He did care. He wanted them all dead, right now.

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