“So, about earlier,” she said, and I sat silent, waiting and sure as shit without a clue where this was going to go. “Ummm, look. I’ll just ask outright, and then it saves us both the awkwardness, okay?”
“Okay?”
“Am I out of the team?” she asked, watching me.
“I don’t know,” I said after a few seconds of careful thought, tamping down the first instinct, which was to scream, “Of fucking course you are, you batshit fucker.”
“Because you don’t want me out or because you want to know what’s going on or…”
“A bit of all of those,” I admitted. “You want to be open about this? Fine. I like simple and straightforward. You’re a hell of a shot, great sniper, steady under fire, good at pointing out the things I miss without being a dick about it. You could also cause me some serious issues with the guild if I boot you, and—”
“Don’t worry about that.” She shook her head and looked away, glancing out of the window. “I’ve been booted from a lot of teams. Julius will understand just fine.”
“Then why’d he send you with us?” I asked. “If he thinks you’d get booted anyway?”
“He didn’t want to.” She shrugged. “He was looking for Pinot.”
“Who’s Pinot?” I asked after a few seconds. “You said that he’s a friend, so you have friends in the guild, and Julius seems to trust you.”
“He’s a friend.” She shrugged. “Julius has been around a long time—he’s used to me. Pinot? He was in one of my old teams, way back.”
“And now?”
“Now he does assessments and fills in the gaps, like I do.”
“All right, what the fuck is the deal here?” I asked after a few seconds of silence. “You’re a damn good soldier, and clearly they trust you, but when I woke you? You were ready to fucking shoot me.”
“I…ah, fuck it.” She groaned, twisting around to look at me, straight on. “Fine, it’s not like you won’t hear soon enough from someone else. Look, I told you I have debts, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I didn’t just ‘get into’ debt. I lost everything. My home, my friends. All of it. I stole from my team, and the shit I stole? Medikits.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I sold them,” she admitted, tears in her eyes. “I fucking sold them for a couple of fixes of angel dust, and I was off my tits on the job. It went sideways and they needed the medikits, and I…I’d sold them. I didn’t know what to do. Seeing the way it was all going wrong, I thought we were going to die, and I…” She shook her head, looking back out of the window.
“I took the rest of the angel dust, all of it in one go, went off the rails, and I just went mad. Shot the shit outta our enemies, but…”
“Your people died?” I guessed after she trailed off.
“Two of them. Sinas and Kerin. Kerin was my partner.”
“You shot…?”
“No!” she groaned. “I never shot my own fucking side. Hell, man, what the fuck do you think of me?”
“I think you were off your tits on drugs!” I snapped back. “You admitted you stole from your own fucking team, and it wasn’t something like loot or creds, which would be shitty but understandable. It was the medikits! Something that when you need it, you really need it!”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking, all right?” she shot back. “I was in need. I was addicted, and I goddamn wouldn’t have done the medikits if I didn’t think we were safe!”
“What do you mean, safe? You were on a mission!”
“One that was supposed to be a cakewalk!”
“You don’t hire mercs for cakewalks!” I snarled. “You hire fucking ACE or whatever to do that shit, or idiots, or you just don’t do it!”
“I KNOW, ALL RIGHT?” she yelled at me, the tears there and clear. For a few seconds, we glared at each other, until she sagged back again, shaking her head and drawing down a deep breath, clearly struggling to get her words out. “Look, I…ah, fuck it, it doesn’t matter. We’re nearly at the guild. I’ll make it easy, and I’ll quit on you. You just…you fuck off and find some replacements for me and Hobbs, and you’re fine, okay?”
I stared at her for a long few seconds, and she sighed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered. “I left the grazer in my locker. I’ll hand it in to Julius, and you’ll all get your cut, then you’re free of me.”
“Why’d you follow me last night?” I asked, troubled but still annoyed.
“I…Look, I’m clean, all right?” she explained. “That wasn’t cheap, though. I lost everything, and now my debts?”
“Cards?”
She snorted. “Wouldn’t that just be perfect, if I was a gambling addict as well?” she mocked herself. “No, I just…it sounds a bit more acceptable than ‘I’m a junkie who couch surfs because I can’t afford my own place.’”
“So when you woke up and had the gun on me?”
“I…” She took a deep breath and let it out, putting on a brittle smile. “Some guys don’t like to be told no, or that I’m not interested in more than the couch. Some don’t take no for an answer. I learned to make sure I’m always armed, that’s all.”
“And the whole walking around in your fucking underwear thing? Because I gotta say, you’re sending some seriously confusing signals.”
“Yeah.” She winced. “Look, I’m a half-elf—”
“Really?” I said sarcastically. “Damn, you know you should hint about that maybe?”
“Shut the fuck up, Kabutt. I’m trying here, okay?” she snapped.
“Yeah, I—” I broke off, took a deep breath, and nodded. “You know what, fair point. Sorry.”
“Right, well, I’m a half-elf, and people expect me to act a certain way. But they’re also scared of us—elves, I mean. Nobody’s ever sure if what they feel is real, or we’re doing it deliberately, or…”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Uh-huh.”
“So when I stay quiet and understated, people try to take advantage, all right? When I act like I don’t give a fuck, it’s a lot less frequent.”
“So it’s all an act?” I asked, surprised. “You gamble that guys aren’t going to try it on if you wave it in their face?”
“You think I’ve got a choice?” she snapped. “Julius lets me crash a few nights a week in the guild for free, but he’s bound by the rules, and his shareholders! He needs to charge me, and I can barely afford my interest payments as it is!”
“Interest?”
“To get clean, I needed a full cleanse, all right? Not just a wipe. I mean a full nanite cleanse, to get my body clean and fit, and then two weeks in a corpo clinic.”
“Right?” My stomach clenched.
I’d heard of them—“health and wellness” clinics, places that took in those who were seriously fucked up with drugs or drink or whatever. They didn’t accept many, though, and those they did? Their victims paid through the nose for it.
A permanent lock on your credit account, they took anywhere from ten to seventy percent of everything that you earned, depending on the level of addiction. And unless you could somehow buy your way out? They did it for life. Your life, anyway.
Take the interest charges, and that you were being charged what they decided was “fair,” for essentially hitting you with a single large medikit and locking you in a room to go cold turkey?
The only good bit was at the end, when they injected you with a mod, a tiny one that interacted with the pleasure centers of the brain. You have a good day, or great sex? Supposedly no effect. You have a sudden chemical high?
Seriously, seriously ill for about a week or two afterward. It was designed to make sure you learned to never, ever touch shit like that again.
The minor issue that all emotions were verifiable by chemical markers had been brought up by some do-gooder, and that same person went missing and was found three days later. Nailed to the underside of a bridge with spikes through their hands and feet. Their tongue was apparently ripped out and they were left to die when the tide rose.
The message was clear.
Keep your mouth shut about our business.
Now that I looked at Reign, like really looked, I got it a lot more. She was damn good at what she did, but that was why she was always on the move. If she was that deep in debt? And that the survivors of her old team split up, thanks to her, then word would spread…
“What’s the deal with Julius and Pinot?” I asked.
“My partner Kerin…he was Julius’s brother.”
“Seriously?” I grunted, shocked. “I’d expect him to hate you more.”
“So did I.” She looked down at her hands as she toyed with the stitching along the back of one glove. “He’s a good guy, though. That’s why he has the guild doing this shit, instead of more profitable missions. He thinks we should be better than we are, and he, well, he gave me a chance.”
“And Pinot?”
“We’ve been friends awhile.” She shrugged. “Pinot lost his whole team. Now he doesn’t like getting close to people, so he does assessments and fills in when people need a tech type.”
“And you’re in debt up to your eyeballs,” I finished.
“Pretty much.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Two thousand credits a month, or forty percent of all my creds earned—whichever is the greater, of course—until I pay off the outstanding balance, which is a hundred and ninety-seven thousand credits.” Her voice dropped as if sick to her stomach as she went on. “Each time I miss a payment? Five percent added onto the balance.”
“Fuck me,” I whispered.
“I’m fine, thanks.” She smiled, looking defeated. “The aftermath isn’t worth it.”
“So, if you—” I broke off as I thought about how to phrase it.
“If I orgasm, I’m ill for about two weeks,” she confirmed, dejected. “Try earning enough to pay for the payments, rent, food and all the rest when you’ve only got two weeks in the month to work.” She quirked her lips. “Puts a bit of a strain on a relationship.”
“I don’t know…” I tried to joke. “Sounds like you’d be fine with most guys?”
“Ha. Well, yeah, not so much with girls, but that’s not really here nor there now. I gave up on it all.”
“And when you’ve been sleeping on couches, just trying to make the payments…” I groaned, shaking my head.
“Yeah,” she admitted grimly. “People tend to take my being there as permission.”
“The way you acted, I was torn all night, thinking you were playing games.” I felt ashamed of myself. “But you can’t afford to crash at the guild all the time, can you?”
“No chance.”
“And this cab ride?”
“It’s…it was an apology,” she whispered, smiling brittlely. “I led you on and took advantage, and then I claimed the bounty when you didn’t know about it. I’m sorry. I was going to split it, but as soon as it hit my account? The clinic took their forty percent, then the bounty guild reversed the payment, saying that someone else claimed the kill. That pushed me into negatives, and incurred a hundred cred fine. The guild accepted the proof I sent, a clip of my staring down my scope and the slug taking them down, but when they sent it again?”
“The clinic took another forty percent?” I groaned, knowing what was coming.
“Yeah.” She nodded, closing her eyes and slowly banging her head on the back of her headrest. “So out of the bounty of seven hundred and forty, they took two-ninety-six. That put me down to four hundred and forty-four. Then, when they reversed the transaction, I was under the minimum, so I was fined a hundred. Then it went back in and I’m left with three hundred and forty-four…and a claim on that of another two ninety-six…”
“Which leaves you with?”
“The cab fare, and lunch.”
“Fuck my life.” I groaned. “And none of it’s even your fault.”
“Think they care?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“Not at all,” I agreed. “So, you basically couch surf because you can’t afford an apartment, you spend all your time at the guild waiting on jobs because you desperately need to hit them to keep your payments going and…” I winced. “And you need to also pay for the ammo and expendables and so on. Shit.”
“And the payout yesterday?” she said. “Most of it was sent to pay off another debt.”
“Fuck.”
“So yeah, I’m tragically poor.” She finished with a little laugh. “But at least I’m clean! There’s that, right?”
“I don’t know how the fuck you’ve not ended it all.” I stared at her with new respect.
“You think I wouldn’t if I could?” She shook her head. “Behavioral mod is part of the deal. I think about seriously self-harming? Same as an orgasm, or drugs. I get fucked up. I’ve thought about it in the middle of a fight before, but I can’t. I keep fighting and then, at the end? Somehow I’m still alive, despite myself.”
We pulled up at the guild, and I tried to knock on the cab, finding it had, as she said, already been paid for.
Reign shrugged as we unloaded our gear, speaking softly as we headed toward the doors.
“Now you know.”
“Now I know,” I agreed. “Okay, so if they take forty percent each time you get paid anything, how the fuck are you expected to pay them off?”
“I’m not.”
“Not at all?”
“Well, there’s an anti-slavery clause in the city charter, so it’s not literal slavery, just, you know, economic.”
“So even if I transferred you the two hundred grand or so you owed—I don’t have it, so don’t get your hopes up; I’m just trying to understand—but even if I did that, they’d take the forty percent, and they won’t accept anything less than the full amount off your debt?”
“Exactly.”
“Can someone else pay it off?” I asked. “Like if we earned that money in the team and we paid it off between us?”
“No. They won’t accept a payment from another account. ‘It’s for your safety,’” she mimicked in a high-pitched, syrupy-sweet voice. “And even if they would? No offense, but I don’t see anyone paying that off for me, not for anything I’m willing to do.”
She quirked a sad smile, then shook her head.
“Don’t go getting any ideas of your own personal half-elf sex slave. I have it on very good authority I’m shit at blowjobs as well, so just…” She shrugged.
“Who told you that?” I asked, unable to help myself.
“I tried to have a relationship once.” She glared straight ahead. “Even knowing that I couldn’t, you know, I tried.”
“And he said that?” I asked, confused.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, either you really don’t understand the concept and you tried to blow him up like a fucking balloon, or he was lying, because I saw you going to town on a ration bar yesterday,” I joked, trying to make her smile. “There’s no way that woman I saw with that bar is crap at blowjobs.”
“Oh, fuck off,” she said, but the change in tone told me I’d cheered her up a little at least. “Look, I’ll go see Julius. It’ll not be held against you, okay?”
“Is that a threat or a promise?” I tried again, before sighing. “Look, Reign, honestly? I’m willing to give this a try, if you are.”
“Seriously?” she asked, surprised. “Even after all this shit?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not gonna lie. I’m uncomfortable knowing what you did, but I understand it as well. Add on now I know that you’re really trying to put me off by acting like the crazy elf, rather than actually trying to get me into bed? Yeah, I feel a little better about this all.”
“Kabutt…” She hesitated and blew out a breath. “Thank you.”
“Hey, don’t thank me yet. That means we need to get ready and go hunting more fucking specters, as well as you talking me through the byzantine fucking rules of registering as a bounty hunter.”
“Ah, shit.”
“Yeah, bureaucracy!” I made a little “jazz hands” wave as best I could, armed and loaded as I was.
“Well, I suppose after that, at least I’ll be ready to shoot some fucker in the face.”