“Well, eh… Contractors’re loaded, right?” the owner prodded.
“High-rankers, maybe,” she scoffed. Despite Casus’ words, her conception of real-estate prices remained twisted, and so she had decided to manipulate the price downward as much as possible. “I figured I might be able to afford the place given its state and location.”
“What state?
“Have you ever lived there? You have to sleep with earplugs in because the basement ventilation is connected to the tramline vents. Not to mention, as I said, the location…”
“Yeah, the location ain’t great. Whatever. Fifty thousand, just take the shitheap off my hands.”
Krahe almost had a coughing fit, but she just barely managed to suppress it. Thankfully, the owner interpreted it as her balking at such a “high” price, and sighing, said: “Alright, forty-five. I can’t go any lower.”
“I… Yeah, I guess I can make that work,” she said with a heavy, reluctant sigh. She deceived as easily as she breathed.
To the owner, this came across as a completely normal negotiation. The price was a bit on the low side, but considering that basic maintenance on the place had been draining his wallet for years now, he was fine with taking a net loss on the sale.
“Y’want to do it now? Don’t matter shit to me, I can draft the contract right now. I’ll even sign in thaumine ink and splash some hemolymph on that bitch so you can get it notarized your own self once I’ve pissed off from this hellhole.”
Once inside, atop a rickety foldout table on the ground floor, the owner drafted the sale contract without much care for his handwriting, resulting in calligraphy that was merely nice rather than utterly meticulous. It was a bit tense to see the lady meticulously go over every bit of the two roughly two-thousand word document, but that tension evaporated when she admitted: “Looks legit. Just to be clear, I will-”
“-probably kill me if you even think that I’m screwin’ you. I know your type. Once this shit’s sold I’m gone, I’m moving to… Some fuckin’ city in Afshan, I dunno. Once your name is on the ownership documents I don’t exist anymore as far as you’re concerned, and the same goes the other way.”
Once both of them had signed, the owner was another step closer to being free of this property, and richer by… An alright sum. It really wasn’t much, but then, he was selling an empty shell of a house in a whatever part of the city. Really, he figured he should thank her for bringing it up first. He couldn’t wait to be out of here. As a silver lining, the anathemist pulled a pair of dregstones, pressing them together for a moment before she showed him one with exactly what he was owed.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
As he left that house, he murmured under his breath: “Fuckin’ vedesian bullshit I ain’t spendin’ another second in a war morph let alone a whole fuckin’ molt cycle piece o’ shit can’t believe that wise guy expects me to…”
He knew it wasn’t smart to mention those kinds of things in front of skinbags, but he also didn’t give a shit and he had no personal reason to believe that woman could even make sense of what he had said. She could, of course, but he would be in Afshan before it could become his problem.
Krahe branded the owner’s words into her brain the moment she heard them, and chased after him, but… He was gone. Somehow, someway, he had vanished from under her nose, and even a meticulous search wasn’t enough to find so much as a trail. Frustrated, she took some solace in the fact that the small splash of his hemolymph wasn’t yet dry on the paper and the thaumine ink would carry his thaumic signature for some time, as was its purpose. Having no other ideas, she took it to Firminus. She had a good excuse to visit him, since she was three days overdue for a checkup, as he made abundantly and scathingly clear when he realized it was her knocking on his door.
Only once she was in the chair, her suit split down the back and her spine spilling out like some gruesome parasite, only then did she bring up the owner and what he had said, and her desire to find him again.
“Not so amusing when someone else is able to vanish, is it? I presume you have a lead that you believe I would help you with…” Firminus grumbled, chewing his cigarette as he spoke, poking and prodding at Krahe’s back. He pulled and poked at muscle bundles, murmuring about the bonding of her own skin with the graft-muscle and the seemingly total absence of rejection symptoms, theorizing on how the biosuit’s presence might be helping the process along.
“He signed the sale contract with imbued thaumine ink and splashed his hemolymph on it. That’s all I’ve got.”
“And what do you expect me to do with that?” the grafter balked. “Individual flymen cannot be identified by their hemolymph, and without a sample to compare it against, his thaumic remnants are no more useful. The most I can do… Perhaps cut out the signature and entomb it in a preservation cell. Is that truly worthwhile for the infinitesimal chance of this leading you back to that man? What did he even say to alarm you in such a way? Assuming you are willing to tell me, of course.”
Krahe cleared her throat, and recited: “‘Fucking vedesian bullshit, I’m not spending another second in a war morph, let alone a whole fuckin’ molt cycle. Piece of shit, I can’t believe that wise guy expects me to…’ And that was it. He also said that he was fleeing to somewhere in Afshan.”
“A war morph… There are not many circumstances which can force a mature evoy to molt into a war morph. However, it could just be a hyperbolic figure of speech; for the evoy, at least for those of them who are not practicing vedesians, the war morph is a sign of great and terrible upheaval. However, one man’s words don’t mean much. I would wager he just interpreted recent happenings as signs that upheaval is coming to Audunpoint.”
“And if it isn’t just a figure of speech?”