For what it is, the range isn’t the worst. Better than most roofs I’ve slept under, that’s for sure.
Empty lobby, nothing but spent shells and cobwebs, a long concrete straightaway where targets used to hang. Scorches and ozone burns from the generations of firearms, a permanent tang of gunpowder in the air. Blank spaces and scuff marks where furniture and booths used to be. Up a small staircase in the back is a cramped intersection of second-story rooms that housed the shop’s previous owner. There’s a kitchen, armory, lounge, office; all branching off from a central dining room with a creaky plastic table yellowed by spilt beer and lighter smoke.
Cal and I took the lounge for ourselves, rearranging the couches so we could sleep side to side with a view of the door. Didn’t feel right to stay anywhere else. Like sleeping in someone else’s bed. It feels like the owner could come walking back in at any moment, leave her keys and boots at the door, and saunter over to the kitchen for a cold beer. Which is why I’m surprised to find Cal in the office today.
She’s slouched behind the old wooden desk at the end of the room, concentrated expression lit from beneath by an electric-blue holoscreen. An ancient terminal built into the desk responds to the clicks and clacks of a physical keyboard as she works. She doesn’t even glance up when I enter, a storm of unanswered frustration driving my footfalls.
Decades of undisturbed dust shake off the blinds like snowdrifts as I peek a quick view of the nearby alleys. Slits of dim neon light cut across the bottom half of my face. Dark as night out there, yet it’s not even noon. Letting the blinds slap shut, I shift back to Cal and give her a quick up-down look.
The Vents hasn’t been kind to either of us. Small wicks of black hang down past her ears, drifting with her head while she nods to herself. Her skin is sheened by a grime that no amount of washing can clean, just like mine. Her arm healed enough to stop using slings just a few days ago, fingers only recently regaining their typing dexterity. And somehow, she’s even paler than when we first met. But it’s the haggardness to her gaze that speaks the loudest. She’s been working in this dark room for hours. She blinks quickly and rubs at her eyes, uncurling from her hunched position when I finally reign in my still-lingering anger and ask, “How’s your arm?”
“Get me a shot of stims and it’ll be good as new,” she grunts, cranking down the screen’s brightness. Her elbow joint pops loudly as she stretches. One golden eye peeks open when I drop my bag atop a threadbare carpet in the middle of the office and take a seat on the desk across from her unprompted, brushing aside a bullet press and framed holographic photos to make space. “You didn’t come home.”
I rap my knuckles against my skull. “Had some stuff to work through.”
“Get any of it figured out?”
“I think I feel worse, actually.”
“Pulling all-nighters tends to do that, I would know,” she solemnly agrees, reaching by my leg to open a drawer. Starts rummaging around inside and pulls out an Innovator’s manual multitool. “You’re going to break down if you keep pushing yourself.”
“I won’t break. Not as long as there’s something I can do. We can’t stay in this place hoping for miracles forever.” My feet kick aimlessly. “We’re cut off from the outside world. Jolie’s been moved to the Imperial Complex, and there’s no way to get in there without going through an army. So while I’m stuck down here spinning my wheels and getting no closer to fixing myself, he’s up there making moves right now, just waiting for us to resurface.”
Rolling closer in her chair, Cal takes my carbon-fiber hand inside hers, holding it while she begins probing the mashed-flat knuckle plates with the multitool. The minor maintenance is like a chew toy for her brain, and one she commonly indulges in. Occupying her immediate attention while she continues to talk. I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me like other people touching my arm does. It always works smoother once she’s done with it, anyways.
“Have you considered what will happen when my brother gets tired of waiting? If that happened tomorrow and he threatened to kill Jolie unless you came to him?” Cal shakes her head. “You’re in no condition to fight anyone, must less one of Gami’s personal cabal- and definitely not Thane. I’m with you as much as you are with me. So take it from a place of friendly concern, farmgirl: you can’t keep going AWOL like this.”
We’re close enough by now that her criticism doesn’t spark nearly as much fight in me as it used to. I can’t exactly refute the point, either. She’s not wrong.
She pats my leg. “Make some space.”
I smirk. “Chair not good enough?”
“Your knees keep bumping me.”
I doubt that’s everything, but I don’t protest when Cal hops up to sit beside me, flopping my right arm out across her lap. The company is nice. And she’s an easy person to sit beside. I scoot over to make a little more room for her. Pick up one of the holographic photos from the desk while she messes around with the twitchcircuits in my finger joints, turning it over in the faint light. It’s a captured moment of a woman with scarred lips and a little girl with burnt orange hair. I set it down gently, pick up another. Same story, more scars, the mother’s smile prouder and softer, the girl now a vivacious, fiery Gunslinger closer to my age.
My eyes wander. Leather boots by the door. Furred capes and flaired coats hanging from hooks. Dried-up datapads in the desk. Wall-mounted maps of the Vents detailing sectors of the undercity and the crime lords who once ruled them. Ancient ash in the tray. Like a snapshot of that mother’s life, immortalized in a frame of dust.
A fingernail trailing up my prosthetic hand drags me back into the moment. “I take it yesterday was as unproductive for you as it was me,” Cal says. She taps the center of my palm; all five fingers twitch inwards at once.
“I wish. Had to meet with Nabuna.”
“Ah. Boy trouble. Does it every time.”
I wince, and not just because of her work.
“He giving you a hard time?” Cal asks.
“Mah. He’s not the problem.”
“Is that so?” She shrugs. “Give me a day. I’ll make him apologize for whatever he did.”
“Please don’t.”
“Hey, I’m not going to kill him.”
“I don’t want you doing anything to him; not when he’s the one putting a roof over our heads.” I roll my eyes dramatically. “Besides. He already knows who you are.”
“Does he? That’s funny.” Her tongue sticks to a corner of her mouth while she moves on to prying back a reinforced plate near the ulna. “I guess I’m not unknown down here.”
“You have such a way with words, Cal.”
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“Hah. Please. Don’t patronize me, Tay. You are terrible at lying.” She chuckles, arm brushing against mine. “I’ve done my fair share of work in the Vents. There was that Dynasty lieutenant, some terrorist who was holding a power grid hostage… even crossed paths with the Armiger once. You wouldn’t want to meet that piece of work.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Her, if the Counterespionage Division’s intel is right. And it’s probably for the best. She’s a vigilante zealot who’s got some real strong opinions about your dad.” Cal nods to herself, caught up in investigating the puzzles of my prosthetic’s inner workings. “All that Gami’s people have to do to get order down here is dangle the threat of me stopping by for a visit. I have no idea why a Venter would help us knowing who I am, but if he’s taken a liking to you, I guess it’s not the worst.”
“I guess not.” I keep still, unsure of how to react in the closeness. Awkwardly reaching for a conversation because it seems the natural thing to do. “What about you? Anything new?”
“I told you that Relics don’t just grow on trees,” she says, draping her left arm over my shoulder so she can look me in the eyes. “I still think your idea is a shot in the dark, being honest. But I’m game for it. We could use some more Relics if we want a fighting chance of beating Thane.”
She leans back, spine arching in a catlike stretch. Head cricking from side to side. I get a close look at the lean muscle of her arms; the hard definition of a lifelong fighter. An assassin. A killer with blood beneath her nails. It’s easy to forget sometimes. Despite being the same age, despite how nonchalant she can act, we’re worlds apart in the lines we’ve crossed. She’s just as dangerous as I am, in her own way.
“…still. Between you and me, I doubt there’s even another Relic in this Section, much less the capital,” she’s saying. “I switched to running a query on the M’s mainframe yesterday. Maybe it’ll pick up a lead that’s not kept under lock and key. But that lead being acquirable, fixable, and useful against Thane is an even longer shot than you figuring out your ki.” She glances over with a halfhearted smirk. “No offense.”
“Say we find one, because I’m not a pessimist.” She rolls her eyes, I keep going. “What’s stopping you from making it work like yours? Figure out some way to insulate me from the suppression field when you turn it on?”
She squints at me. “That’s… not how Relics work. You can’t just change them to whatever you want; they’re not like JOY classes.”
“It’d be way more helpful if they were.”
Cal pats my cheek and laughs. “Why don’t you focus on more useful things, like why the sky is blue.”
Still shaking her head in amusement, she nudges my arm off none-too-gently. I curl the fingers inwards one at a time. Smoother than they did before she touched them, true to form. The aches and resistance in the knuckles are all gone.
When I glance over, her yellow eyes are fixed on my hand, a contented quirk to her mouth. She takes her time in wandering back up to meet my gaze. Hard to avoid noticing when we’re this close. Mutually exhausted, yet neither immune to the fact that we’re both still sitting here.
It's just a glance, really. A slide of the eyes, low to high. Nothing more.
Cal pulls away from the moment first, sliding off the desk and leading the way to the kitchen. “This place is stuffy. Let’s get some fresh air.”
I don’t protest.
Five minutes later, we’re crashed on the couches in the lounge with tumblers of cheap alcohol potent enough to clean toilets. A huge old stream screen fizzles on the wall. Crackling noises emanate from the speakers when I plug my JOY into a manual port and set it to pick randomly from the endless library of fight tapes I’ve downloaded. Most of them are from Dad’s matches in the pro leagues. Today’s another classic. Metro Blockhouse, championship level. The only battlefield open to the sky. It’s dusk. A crowd of tens of thousands, the entire tower packed top to bottom with people watching on every screen they can. The grandstanding voice of Greggus Rebun, Aunt Jolie’s old boss, cuts on halfway through his grand intro for Dad’s first official fight as Champion.
Cal actually sits up, pointing at the screen with the same hand she’s using to hold her drink. “Holy shit, I actually know this one.”
I glance over. “Were you in the crowd?”
“Me? Hah, no. They had it on at the house…” She pauses to sip. “…the group house. All of us were watching.”
“I was too. Jolie and I watched it in the living room. By the fire with popcorn.”
“Jolie was with you?” Cal asks incredulously. “That can’t be right. This was Mars’ commemoration fight; the biggest moment of his career. She would have been in his booth with all the other bigshots.”
I look down at my drink, rubbing a carbon-fiber finger against the beading condensation. “…It was my birthday.”
Cal says nothing. Lets the tape continue to run, eventually winding down the volume once the action starts. Both drinks low now, leftover takeout from my earlier stop strewn across a low table between us. The tape ends with two quiet clicks right as my father stoops to help his fallen opponent up from the ground. I’m too busy repacking my bag for tonight to notice the tape that gets randomly pulled up next. Only when Cal stiffens beside me do I look up at her, see the reflection in her eyes, and then look to the screen, where a knife to the heart plays in near silence.
It's a video I took myself.
Even without the date stamped in the corner, I know it by heart. Thane is older, late into his teens, dark and quiet and inquisitive as he pours over the chessboard between him and Jolie for the tenth time. We’re in the kitchen. Noon, doors thrown open, Thane fresh from the pool with a towel over his shoulders and Jolie’s shirt opened three buttons down from the collar. The board is old, the pieces clumsily carved from wood, a small stone from the garden replacing the kingpiece on one team. A small clock on the windowsill keeps ticking up, just past five minutes.
Jolie yawns. Eyelids heavy with pretended boredom. But she never does anything without a purpose. She’s the furthest thing from bored. The boy in front of her is the best challenge she ever found. I never cared much for the game. So it was natural, of course, that her love of it would infect Thane instead. They were always close; two minds that operated on the same calculating wavelength. The game between them a whetstone shared.
Thane’s fingers touch each piece, hands moving in vague paths as his mind plays out the individual futures. You can see everything of him in the moment. The gliding grace of a killer inherited in his genes. The patience of my aunt as he weighs every option. The mirth of my father as he notices I’m recording. He can’t resist glancing over at me anyways. Just a flick of the eyes.
It's a whole story in a heartbeat. Rather than turn it off, I let it play out, not shutting myself to the pain it brings. It hurts. So, so badly. Worse because of how sweet those days were.
Life was so much simpler then. I had so much more to live for. So many better things to fight for. All I have left now is the illness inside, and it’s no wonder my heart is so polluted that it serrates me when I call upon it. Deep down, I know how badly I need to change. I need something new to fight for; something to replace the pain with a better well to draw on. Hate and anger is anathema to my nature. Yet it’s all that I have left.
The tape ends. Another plays, back to the fights. My heart’s still in the past. So is Cal’s. She’s propped up on her elbow. Serious for a rare moment.
“Why lie for him?” she asks. “After everything Thane has done to you, you still told me that it was Gami who killed your father.”
“Because he did. Not Thane.”
I ball Dad’s tank top up in my lap, squeezing it as tight as I can.
“It was… supposed to be exile,” I say. Faltering at first. “Thane was going to help Gami force Dad to step down and leave the Section. I was taken for leverage.” I force it out mechanically, the only way I can. “There was a standoff. Dad thought they were going to kill me. He tried to get me away. He was never going to hurt Thane, but when he lunged at us… there was no way to know. It happened so fast. That’s how it is in a fight. You can’t hesitate.”
Cal’s hand twitches like she wants to reach out. I sag into the couch, settling my right shoulder in the cushions on instinct. The rest comes out in low tones.
“Thane tried to protect himself. Just like we’d been trained to do. He switched from holding me to bracing with the point forward to meet the lunge and…” My whole body locks up as I fight to hold back the mental image. “…it was an accident,” I whisper, dry-eyed. “It was an accident.”
“An accident.” Cal’s voice cools. “Is that what you tell yourself? So you can sleep?”
“It’s the truth. Whether I want it or not.”
“The truth sure didn’t seem to stop you from trying to kill him.”
“I lost control. I’m not going to let it happen again.”
“And if we have to fight him?” she asks. Waiting to see if I’ll lie. “Were you going to ask me to kill my own brother? Or are you planning on doing it yourself?”
“I don’t know.” My fingers tighten in the couch. “Try staring down someone you’ve loved with all your heart through half your life. Someone whose mind and body you know every piece of. Your one and only. Your person. A person who then betrayed everything you’ve ever known, betrayed you, betrayed that love you share, destroyed everything you had, and cast you away to rot.” I look at nothing, thinking of years ago, that garden in my mind’s eye. “Put that person within arm’s reach after everything they’ve done; and think about what you’d do.”