The first time the boy died, he drowned. He was declared dead by the self-taught medics of the catacombs beneath the city that used to be known as La Ville-Lumière(1). It had been centuries since a light burned in the city, since such a brightly illuminated target was an early casualty of one of the many wars.
As above, so below; it was now a city of death.
So it was fitting that in the halls of the sightless dead, the dancing boy met his brutal fate. He was a skinny, teenaged mongrel on the day he was beaten to pulp and tossed into the slow-moving sewage channel. A bag of fresh bones to join the soup of waste and garbage on the road to nowhere.
Unhindered, the body drifted for a bit, until it hit a pile of mushy bones that had tumbled out of the walls. There it stuck, dipping and twisting against the bank of garbage and silt.
Only empty sockets and centuries of ashes witnessed the moment when the boy, most surprisingly, un-died. It was an uncomfortable experience, involving the purging of a gallon or so of putrid water from his lungs. The water was possibly more lethal than the beating. Only time would tell.
Some time later, the boy opened his eyes and saw nothing. He was in pain, but as soon as his eyes adjusted to the total darkness, he recognized the last thing he'd seen before they smashed his face into the ground. The walls, paved in skulls, and the floor, brown with the dust of bones that had crumbled over centuries, were as familiar to the boy as his own hands.
Despite the thorough beating, the boy realized he was still alive in the catacombs. The other option was that the afterlife was a continuation of the bone-drenched tunnels he'd grown up in.
Either way, the silver-tongued boy once known as Garou, burlesque dancer and petty thief extraordinaire, was not going to spit in the face of fortune. His would-be murderers had left him for dead: bruised, bleeding, and half-drowned. It had been retaliation long overdue, for the many trinkets Garou had stolen from the notorious Fantum Gang. The Fantums(2) ruled the subterranean haunt of death and half-lives, keeping all its miserable inhabitants in adequate fear and misery.
But now he had found his way out. No one was looking for a dead boy. So Garou followed the secret passage to the upworld, stole a gas mask from a corpse, and walked forgotten streets until he found a starship illegal and stupid enough to have docked in the Ville sans Lumière(3).
On that starship, Garou did what any sensible person would: he reinvented himself. Shy, socially awkward, illiterate Garou died in the charnel river; the fabulous Jupiter Jive left the burnt remains of the planet once known as Ithir(4) on a smuggling freighter bound for the new frontier.
It would be twelve years before Jupiter (formerly Garou) died a second time. Over the following three years, he would die thirty-two times. And in 48 hours, Jupiter would die for the thirty-fifth time. Every time, he wondered if it was the last. Every time, he had reawakened in some godforsaken pit or ditch, with his ankle cuff blinking coordinates to his crew. He never quite remembered the dying, but he knew the signs that heralded it. It was always at the "full moon" phase of his home planet's lunar cycle.
At this moment, he guessed it was about 48 hours from death number thirty-five, and as Jupiter Jive perused the foam at the bottom of his mug, he wondered if this time he would stay dead.
Despite his peculiar condition(5), Jupiter Jive had it pretty good. In fact, for the past three years, he'd had nothing but good luck and good health. Treasure fell into his lap, he hadn't even caught a cold or sniffle, and it was impossible for him to get drunk (he had performed extensive tests).
Though he wasn't galactically infamous for his brains (rather, a devastating smile, snake hips, and incredible style), one of Jupiter's many secrets was his intellect. He was smart enough to connect his three years of extraordinary luck (and miraculous lack of hangovers) to his three years of lunar death cycles. After extensive research, Jupiter decided to accept the obvious: somewhere in his treasure trove of wrongfully borrowed plunder, there was a cursed artifact that wanted to go home.
The problem was this: Jupiter loved his stuff, and in his share of over a decade's worth of pilfered treasures, there were thousands of rare, sacred, and mystical objects. Of course, if he'd cataloged each item, he could have narrowed the haystack down to the past three years. But such a catalog would have inhibited the free, willful, and natural repression of hitherto undeclared treasure. His crewmen would mutiny if forced to turn out their pockets.
Jupiter couldn't blame them. He'd kept objects to himself, himself. They had all made an oath to share and share equally, by set amounts. They'd sworn to hold to this oath upon entering the Jupiter's Jivers(6) brotherhood. That they would then quietly and privately break the oaths often as possible was their individual business—unless they were caught—and then it became a capital offense.
In short, Jupiter had trinkets he did not wish to share with the others: an uncomfortable multitude of personal ephemera that might be, any one, responsible for his death-curse. Until six Ithirian weeks ago, Jupiter hadn't desired to find this loaded luck charm. Death by full moon and reanimation by morning were a small price to pay for cosmic success and stardom. Barely a trifle.
What had changed Jupiter's mind was this:
His accomplice, Vul'Peck, First Junior Captain and Ship's Medic (and a tri-bearded Atelian from the planet Rax) had told him the truth he'd seen in Jupiter's post-reanimation bioscan.
"You're dying, Jive."
Jupiter flashed his soul-thieving grin. "All the time, as only you and I know. I die every month. What of it?"
Vul'Peck had been the first one to give sewage-stinking Garou a chance. The Atelian was also the only one of Jupiter's Jivers who might actually care about Jupiter himself. That was why Vul'Peck ignored Jive's famous megawatt grin and forged on. "Not that kind of dying. The kind where you stay dead. I don't know how many more times your heart can stand a reboot. It's getting weaker every month. It seems to be . . . I don't know, tearing. It's a kind of deterioration I've never seen before."
Jupiter leaned back in his chair, contemplating his oldest and only friend. Out of all the Jivers, Vul'Peck was the only one who had any goodness left. He was the only one who wasn't always lying. And he wouldn't lie about this.
Jupiter sighed and put his boots up on the desk, ignoring Vul'Peck's deadly glare. "In the 1,093 days since I first died and reanimated, how many purloined objects have I appropriated?"
Vul'Peck spread his hands, wiggling all thirteen fingers in the Atelian expression of cluelessness. "A lot?"
Jupiter leaned forward, "And how many in the previous 2,557 days since I joined the Jivers?"
Vul'Peck shook his head, fingers still wiggling like worms. "You can't actually . . . "
Jupiter cut him off, "it's impossible, there's too many of them."
Vul'Peck sighed, "A very long dead man from your dead world once said, 'A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.' You could start small; replace a few relics on the side. Maybe you'll find the right one."
Jupiter had waited until Medic Vul'Peck left to throw the tantrum. It wasn't fair; he'd never asked for this. Nevertheless, the Junior Captain's words wormed into his shriveled heart. Could he feel its beats weakening already?
That night, he returned the first relic.
It had been 152 days and six deaths since that particular moment, and Jupiter had returned 75 stolen treasures. In 48 hours, he would die, and then (hopefully), reanimate. Or he might not die at all, and know he'd found the source of his curse (?).
There was only one catch: the next temple he intended to sneak into was a place he'd sworn he'd never return to. The sanctum of inner sanctums of the Select Order of Intergalactic Peace Keepers. This time, he might not be the only one who died . . .