The sun was setting as Saketa found the street. Services were virtually paralysed, leaving walking as the only realistic way to travel, and the state of the city itself was at least as great a hindrance as the general unrest.
The emergency services were entirely focused on saving lives, digging out people who had been buried in rubble or in basements for all this time but had access to water. That left only individual initiative to clear out the streets or save possessions from half-standing homes.
The predators came out during times like these, either from the poorer neighbourhoods or people’s own inner shadows, and no small amount of the chaos had to do with looting or petty gangs seizing upon a rare opportunity. As she jogged through semi-lit streets, Saketa saw people stand guard by the entrances to residential streets or by a salvageable building, holding metal pipes, tools or whatever other weapons would deter lesser troublemakers.
But since shadow and light always existed together, she also saw kinder scenes. The great pillar that had keeled over to such dramatic effect had crushed a building close to her destination, causing another one to tip over and partially crush a third. Around that third one were gathered regular people, removing rubble by hand and moving semi-intact furniture out into the street. She supposed the old man sitting on a weathered couch was the owner, and those others were too disparate-looking to all be his family.
In the darkness, remember the light, she thought to herself. It was an easy thing to learn to recite as a child, but learning the actual meaning was a lengthier lesson. It took experience, and she did her best to keep that scene in her memory as she finally saw that plaque on a street corner.
Fiki-Oko, it read in three different scripts, the middle one of which she understood.
The ruins of the enormous pillar lay across the street, but it lay at a very slight angle and by now one could walk beneath it in a crouch. There were people milling about and just enough light remained in the sky for them to see her, and so she decided against anything fancy and simply got down on all fours and crawled.
It was an uncomfortable feeling to have that vast mass, however many thousands of tons, up above her head, held there by nothing save crushed houses. Thirteen days ago, this had been the tower that had served as this area’s spaceport. Now it was an ugly, tragic gash across the city; an unfortunately literal metaphor for the divide between peoples around here. Saketa had yet to hear anything truly reliable about who exactly had brought it down; there was no shortage of accusations flying about.
17, read the first plaque she could read beyond the pillar, followed by 19, so, thankfully, she had gone in the right direction.
Here there was no traffic. An eerie silence was broken only by music coming from a fourth-floor window that had been shattered by the great boom of the crash. Saketa prepared for battle, focusing her body, mind and spirit, stretching as she walked the final distance.
There was nothing at all notable about Fiki-Oko 29. It was a humble enough, moderately neglected three-storey with a bit of a courtyard. The broken windows had been given slapdash repairs by fitting hard plastic sheets over them, but she could still hear the cadence of voices through them as she stepped up to the door.
It was locked, but it was a simple matter of pushing the sword between door and frame, cutting through the plain mechanism and letting herself through.
The interior was as unimpressive as the exterior; an unlit and largely empty space that had clearly not been used for anything until very recently. She followed the sound of voices through the entrance hall, a room beyond it, and finally a large room in the back of the building. She kept her sword at the ready, touching the red blade with her fingertips, focusing on the bond between it and her.
At the centre of the room was a stage, on which a large man in a combat outfit was orating. Just behind him stood two men in hard breastplates, with swords sheathed at their hips and pistols on their opposite hips. The crowd consisted of about one hundred people, all baseline humans and mostly on the younger side.
The man on the stage was using a local dialect Saketa didn’t speak. But she understood enough to catch references to an infection, cleansing, otherness. The rage-twisted faces and occasional harsh bark of agreement among the listeners made it clear what the general subject was. Then there were the three crates the speaker stood by. The one in the middle was open, showing carbines just like the ones used in the standoff from a couple of hours ago.
Saketa passed near a man whose distinctively cut suit marked him as a foreigner, as well as a local who was whispering translations into his ear.
“... great wave,” she heard him say. “The war is spreading, the battle lines are being drawn. And do we want our families...”
Everyone was too busy being fascinated and angry and encouraging one another’s anger to notice a sudden stranger in their midst. Saketa held her sword in a way that didn’t draw attention to it, and unlike a combat situation she had all the time she needed to focus her energies.
She held a palm out to the left-side box and again reached into the universe. Attraction was a lot trickier than repulsion. Whether that was due to it simply being less useful and so less practised or some inherent law, she did not know.
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But in her hand was the sword, providing balance between forces. And after three or four seconds she unleashed them, pulling her arm back. The box flew off the stage like a bullet, passing over people’s heads and smashing into a wall with shattering force. Bits of wall, box and weapon flew about and people yelped and confusedly shrank away in various directions.
Saketa now brought her sword up into view and yanked off the poncho. There were disbelieving mutters that had the feel of curses, and the angry mass of people parted as she fixed her eyes on the speaker and slowly approached him.
“Warden!” he said in a raspy voice with an air of affected greeting and spread his arms wide. “I heard you were around, but did not think I warranted such attention!”
“I think you did,” she replied, and arrived at the front of the stage. The men on either side of him drew their swords as she hopped onto it, and one of the far left of it drew a pistol.
“Really?” the speaker said as he turned a condescending look towards the man. “Really?”
The man sheepishly holstered the weapon and hesitantly drew a long knife. Saketa stopped in front of the leader, a few steps and the open carbine box between them.
His eyes were bloodshot, there was an oddly bloated quality to his flesh, and his skin was heavily marked by dark, bulging veins, particularly around the nose. Saketa felt free to be disgusted, given that all of this was self-inflicted.
“Derro-red,” she commented. “It does terrible things to you.”
“But it helps me do terrible things to people,” the man said and grinned, showing teeth marked by incessant gnashing.
“Indeed,” Saketa said. She pointed with her free hand. “You are Tomos Tel Usta. Bandit, mercenary, and lately associated with Volkan Vol’s war effort.”
“That’s me,” Usta said. “Riding the storm!” he added, looking past her shoulder and punching the air as he shouted at the gathered people. A few voices shouted acknowledgements.
“Put down your weapons,” she told his men. “I have only come for this man.”
“Any man who loses his courage dies by my hand once this Warden is dealt with,” Usta said through a sharkish grin. “There’s no room for cowards where we’re headed.”
“The Fourth Fleet,” she said, and kind of hoped the revelation of her knowledge would shake him up some. It did not.
“That’s it,” he said, still grinning. “The fourth blade sweeping through the Nearer Fringe, clearing away the filth.”
“You sell guns to subtype criminals, then use the results to justify your rhetoric,” she said, hoping to at least give some of his people pause. “The carbines used in that hostage-taking... they came from those boxes.”
“Nonsense, Warden!” the man shouted dramatically, getting more acknowledgement from the crowd. “I have no truck with the non-people!”
“It is public knowledge that Wardens do not lie,” Saketa said, meeting his showy rage with steady steel. “Now stand down, tell me where the Fourth Fleet is, and I-”
He brought a snap-blade out from the small of his back. It unfolded in the blink of an eye, reaching almost the length of her own sword, as he lunged at her.
All that combat drug use had given him strength and speed beyond baseline limits, but Saketa had a different power to draw on, and parried. His two guards reacted with the speed of normal but experienced warriors and came at her before she could retaliate. She dodged and brought her red blade down on the back of a man’s unprotected head, slicing right through.
Usta kept up the attack, combining skill and ferocity, his bloodshot eyes burning as he swung once, twice, thrice. Saketa danced about the stage, not letting the other two men on it get behind her as she snatched the scabbard off her hip. She saw a chance to cut through Usta’s guard but badly needed him alive, and so deflected the blade instead with her right hand before jabbing the scabbard at him with her left. It struck his eyebrow, bursting it open.
Normally a man would have been stunned by a blow like that, delivered with the force she currently possessed, but it only pushed him back for a moment. Saketa used it to relocate a bit with her inhuman quickness, maintaining control of this battle.
The crowd was in chaos: Some shouting, others running, and at least one found the daring to charge the stage and come up behind her. She felt the person coming and swung a leg around, striking a woman square on the face and throwing her off her feet.
Another one threw something and Saketa ducked her head and let it fly over, a moment before that other guard reached her just ahead of his boss. She took a moment to focus into her blade, to channel the power through it, and swung her sword to meet his.
Red sliced through simple grey, severing his blade just above the hilt. She kept up smooth movement, bringing the blade around to cut into the back of his upper thigh before he could change direction. The man yelped and fell off the stage and out of the fight, not dead but disabled.
She did not have time for another such focus before Usta crossed blades with her again, slamming a great deal of power and weight against her arms. It pushed her back for a moment, and he followed by swinging his elbow up before she could react properly. It clipped her temple, throwing her back some more and worryingly close to the edge of the stage and the two additional men with swords coming towards it through the crowd.
Saketa risked a Shift. It was a tiny one; just a few metres and to a location she could see with her own eyes. She and the world vanished to one another for an instant as she crossed that space without crossing it, reappearing the instant she left. She stabbed the man with the knife in the foot before he could even register shock. Usta turned with great speed, but she was just a little bit faster and came at him with a lunging kick to the midsection. The force of it sent him off the stage. She had been hoping to hit at least one of the men coming her way, but their leader instead flew in between them on his way to the floor.
They leapt up, just as two of the crowd did so as well, wielding broken carbines as clubs. A throw from the diminishing crowd hit her on the back for a minimal impact. She kept on dancing about, focusing through the blade again as she evaded a strike and sent her blade into the back of a man’s breastplate. It cut right through, sending out a shower of blood that hit the other guard as he tried swinging at her.
She parried, and drove her pommel into his face, sending him at those two with the carbines and giving them pause.
Saketa glanced sideways, looking for her quarry amidst the mostly fleeing crowd. He was passing through a back door with something in his hand. She was about to turn and give chase when a set of small explosions rocked the room and her eardrums.
The ceiling collapsed.