Sora

“Actually, Softie, do you know a place with a real bed we could stay for the night?” Thea asked.

I didn’t mind the nickname. I had been called much worse in the past, and something about the short elf told me she was dangerous. I had seen my fair share of body modification before, so I had dismissed her eyes and teeth as just a strange aesthetic.

They weren’t even all that strange in some of the circles I had been a part of while on New Eden, but when I sat near her so I could give her some of Sheila’s tea, I saw an unnatural life in that darkness. I didn't know how she got those eyes, but they weren’t mods, and every single one of my instincts told me she was dangerous, which had me conflicted because I knew she wasn’t a bad person.

I always trusted my instincts, and in the same way that I knew Teolix wouldn’t protect Sami, I knew Thea wouldn’t let anybody hurt her—or me, for that matter.

“There’s a motel near the port, Merideth’s place. It’s not the nicest, but it’s clean and it’s cheap. If you’re just looking to stay until morning, it’s a good place for it.”

Thea nodded and looked back towards the executive, who was still asleep on the table, in a puddle of drool. Never meet your heroes.

“Thanks, and Softie, I can tell that you’re worried, but don’t be. I always protect my people.”

I nodded solemnly, and she went to wake up the sleeping elf. Thea had clearly meant to reassure me, but I only heard the implied threat. Fucking with anybody she considered to be “her people” was clearly a death sentence.

I couldn’t leave the area fast enough.

Sheila was tending the bar, and I sat down out of the way, waiting for her to finish with her current customers. It didn’t take long for the large orcish woman to bring me a glass of the wine that she knew I loved.

I didn’t even taste it as I drank the entire glass.

“It was that bad, huh? What did the elves want?”

I grimaced and offered the glass back to Sheila. She refilled it and then, like some sort of benevolent goddess, she placed the rest of the bottle on the bar near me.

“One of those elves is Executive Bryce Virra,” Sheila raised an eyebrow at that, but let me continue. “The other, well, I don’t think she’s an elf. Fuck, maybe she is, I don’t know. What I do know is that she’s crazy dangerous. The moment she sobered from your tea, I had to fight every single one of my instincts just to sit next to her and not run out of the room with both of my tails between my legs.”

“You trust your instincts here?”

I glared back at her. “You haven’t forgotten about the Kami incident, have you?” I monotoned before forgoing the full glass and drinking straight from the bottle.

Sheila grimaced at the reminder and drained the glass herself before storing it under the counter.

“Okay, so they’re dangerous, but what did they want with you?”

I held the opaque bottle to the light to figure out how much I had left. Maybe half? Probably not enough, so I looked towards Sheila and she sighed before setting another bottle on the counter.

“They needed a navigator. Teolix sent them to me, and I agreed to go with them.” My ears drooped, and I fell forward onto the bar in an appropriately dramatic fashion.

“You don’t trust Teolix.”

It was a statement, not a question, and it was exactly true. I never did trust Teolix, but he was a dragon and you don’t say no to a dragon. Well, I had said no to a dragon, but only after Sami almost got hurt and I would never let that happen again.

I looked up from the bar towards the impatiently waiting orc.

“That’s not true at all. I absolutely trust Teolix to be a greedy asshole dragon who doesn’t care about his own people. And that greedy asshole dragon just happens to have bought the keys to the entire colony. He’s planning on using them to take over the place and the executive thinks corporate police is going to get involved.”

Sheila looked equal parts concerned and angry in the sort of way that only a full-blooded orc was capable. She took my unopened bottle of wine with her left hand, setting it back on the shelf and whacking me on the head with her right at the same time.

“Sora, you fucking useless thembo, next time lead with the apocalypse.” She walked around the bar and I stood as she wrapped me in a massive hug. “If you actually trust these two, then go get your sister and get far away from the shitstorm that’s coming. We’ll be fine here, and I don’t want you to get in our way.”

I buried my head against the large woman, not letting go as I relished the embrace. Sheila had always been there for us when we needed it, and I hated to leave just when she was going to be needing the extra hands.

“I’m sorry, I know you’re going to be shorthanded but—”

“But you have to take care of your sister. I knew your priorities when I hired you, Sora, and I won’t fault you for looking after your family. Besides, I wasn’t joking about you getting in the way. My shoulder still hurts from the last time you held a gun. Now let go of me so that I can warn the girls. You aren’t the only one with people to protect.”

I squeezed her one last time before taking a step back and looking up at her with a sad smile.

“Thanks, Sheila. I know that Teolix has been putting pressure on your business ever since you hired me, and I just wanted to say that I appreciate you taking me in when nobody else would.”

She laughed and clapped my arm as she walked past. It hurt, but I held back my grimace.

“Go on and get out of here. You and your sister need to pack and there’s no way in the hells that I’m paying you for the night.”

I was smiling as I left The Garden, but the cold night air brought me back to reality. We were going to need to hurry to get everything in order if we wanted to leave on time, so I sprinted back to the apartment.

Okay, “apartment” was far too generous a thing to call our current living situation.

Sami ran Keg’s repair shop during the day and instead of paying her, Keg gave us the privilege of staying in the storage room above the garage. Which was dirty and cramped and always smelt like engine smoke, but we were allowed to use the customer waiting area to cook food as long as nobody was around, so there was that.

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Gods, I hated it there so fucking much.

The room was bad enough, but Keg was working Sami to death and refused to pay her even a single credit. The kid was barely in her twenties but was already leagues above any other mechanic on New Eden. Hells, she was leagues above any other mechanic, period.

When news got around that my sister was working at Keg’s shop, his business had quadrupled overnight, but all the customers refused to let him touch anything more complicated than a fleshlight, which meant Sami had to do everything.

It got to where the asshole only ever showed up to collect payment after Sami was done. I kept calling him out on his greedy bullshit behavior, but that only ever caused him to insult me or explain how ungrateful I was being and that we should just be happy to have a place to stay.

The worst part? If you ignored Keg’s racial slurs and comments on my sexuality, he was right. We had been incredibly lucky just to have a roof over our heads.

Teolix had blacklisted me the moment I quit as his navigator. That meant if he caught anybody helping us, they would receive an unexpected visit from a pair of goons with metal bats. It didn’t take long for word to get around and people who I once thought of as friends stopped taking our calls.

Teolix said he wouldn’t force me to work for him, but he sure as the hells wouldn’t let me work for someone else.

It was by some miracle that Keg wasn’t afraid of the dragon, and Teolix needed Sheila, so she could take pity on me.

Which was really just another way of saying that Keg was a senile old dwarf with a death wish and Sheila ran the only brothel on New Eden that would service gang members.

Teolix and his goons weren’t going to stop fucking me. So, I figured I should at least start charging them for it.

I climbed up the rusty ladder, and into the small loft. Sami was engrossed in repairing some sort of strange gadget, probably belonging to the old mining rig I saw with its pieces spread around the garage. I crouched low and slowly crept towards her.

The ancient floorboards betrayed me with a loud creaking noise, causing Sami’s ears to tilt towards where I was.

“Hey Sora, are you done with your shift already? Give me a moment, and I’ll make us some breakfast. I just need to finish this repair for the foreman before I can open the shop.”

She was clearly exhausted and apparently a little delirious. I slipped up behind her chair before wrapping my arms around her in a loose hug and resting my chin on her head.

“Hey sweetie. It’s only eleven o’clock, no need for breakfast yet.”

Sami kept working, but returned my hug by resting her cheek against my arm.

“Is everything alright with Sheila? She doesn’t usually let you go until morning.”

I didn’t have regular shifts at The Garden; instead I just showed up between nine and ten, then went home when Sheila determined that there wasn’t enough money flowing to keep everybody paid.

That was usually between four and five in the morning, which was around when Sami would get up to open the shop, but recently it was more common for her to still be awake.

“Something happened, and she sent me home early. Could you take a break? I need to talk to you about it.”

Sami paused for a moment to process that, but it was only for a moment.

“Can it wait? Keg can’t afford to buy a new aft receiving manifold for the digger and the foreman said that if we can’t get it fixed, they’ll have to shut down the east mine. So I need to get the old one working before he comes to pick it up tomorrow or nobody gets paid.”

What a load of bullshit. I would bet every last credit that Keg was charging the foreman for a replacement part, then pocketing the money. He was probably even charging him three or four times the part’s actual price, claiming he had to rush order it.

“It’s kind of important. How much longer do you think it’ll take to fix the taffy receiver thingy?”

She snorted at my joke before going quiet.

“Um, the actual repair shouldn’t take much longer. I mostly just need to reassemble it, but installing it and closing the digger up again is probably going to take a few hours, at least.”

Which meant she had probably been planning on actually getting sleep tonight. It wouldn't have been much, but it was still better than her recent pattern.

“Let’s compromise. I’ll go get you some food while you put the thingy back together, then we can talk while you eat dinner. I bet you haven’t eaten anything today anyway.”

She had been getting thin recently. Which meant she was skipping meals to keep up with the workload. It wasn’t healthy.

“I ate breakfast.”

Half of a nutri-paste bar that I saw her eat sixteen hours ago. The other half was still sitting by the digger down in the garage.

“Deal?”

She didn’t respond, so I bit her ear. Hard.

“Ouch! Fuck, Sora, that really hurt!”

I ducked down behind the chair just in time to avoid her elbow and switched to my more agile fox form before racing towards the ladder. I had to dart around the small room as she threw things at me. Only about one in three of her projectiles hit, which had me worried. She was usually a pretty good aim.

“Love you! I’ll be back with dinner!” I shouted up from the base of the ladder.

“Fuck you! Diva bitch!”

I could hear her smile in the response. It was at that moment that I knew everything was going to be okay. We would get through whatever this was together, just like we always had and just like we always would.

~~~~

I went to Sami’s favorite noodle stand halfway across the city. It was a bit of a walk, but I didn’t think she’d actually talk to me until her ear stopped bleeding, so I had some time to kill. I got two of her usual order, spicy synth-chicken ramen with extra spice and extra synth-chicken, but they were out of her brand of beer so I had to stop at a bodega near the shop.

When I finally got back to the garage, Sami was installing the manifold. She must have smelt the food because a grease smeared glare popped up from behind the vehicle. Her ears were flat against a short mess of stained chestnut hair, and she was forcing a frown a little too hard while sniffing at the air.

I held the ramen in an outstretched hand and removed the lid before fanning the spicy fumes towards her. She must have realized what it was, because her eyes went wide, and her fangs were on full display in a toothy grin.

“Bribe accepted, but you’re still a jerk.”

“I’m the jerk? You threw things at me. I could have died.”

I walked over towards a freestanding workbench and delicately stacked the empty energy drink cans into a pile, so I could set her ramen down while she wiped her hands on a grease-covered towel.

She must have been trying to clean the towel, because her hands came away dirtier than they were before.

“You bit me!”

Sami stood across from me indignant, so I handed her a beer and a set of chopsticks. She took my offering and started eating with all the grace that I had come to expect.

“You weren’t answering me.”

“I was thinking,” she grumbled through a mouth full of fake chicken and too-spicy noodles.

“You took too long, and now you have ramen. You’re welcome.”

I took out the second container and a second set of chopsticks, which I placed in front of myself, but I didn’t have any intention of opening either of them.

“Thanks.”

I nodded and began a detailed retelling of what happened at The Garden that night. I told her everything that I remembered and she just took it in while eating. Midway through the explanation, I took the full container in front of me and swapped it for her empty one.

At the end of the story, all that she had left of the second container were a few floating noodles and a shallow puddle of dark red broth. That’s when Sami asked the first of her two questions.

“Do you trust these two?”

I did. I had heard stories about the executive. She was supposed to be powerful, and while I felt the massive amount of mana around her, she didn’t worry me. That other one, though…

“Yeah, I trust them. That woman with the freaky eyes, Salinthea. She terrified me, but she wouldn’t betray us and when she said she protects her people, she meant it. I would so much rather be one of ‘her people’ that even if I didn’t think the apocalypse was coming, I would still go with her.”

Sami slurped the last of the broth directly from the container, then looked at me and nodded with a solemn, unspoken trust.

“When do we leave?”