Chapter Seventeen

Eagerly, and surprising herself by feeling so eager, Natalia slid into the room in front of Rei and took a look around. She didn’t know what to expect. It certainly wasn’t what she found.

The room was fairly small, especially when compared to the huge space outside its door. Several computers, obviously cobbled together from parts salvaged here and there, dominated the lone, battered desk in one corner. Rei’s bed was a large futon shoved in the opposite corner with a rack holding various clothing. A few posters and art prints tried to cheer up the gray walls, and succeeded a little better than she might have expected if they’d just been described to her. A slightly worn, Persian style rug covered the floor.

“Somewhat spartan, isn’t it.” She said. She didn’t know why it surprised her that it was, but it did. Rei came off as so confident and had a talent for commanding the space around him so well, that she’d begun to imagine some Ali Baba style treasure cave.

“Yeah. I know. I didn’t have a lot growing up, though, and I guess I never got used to really having stuff. You can hang your coat on that hook there.” He gestured vaguely, obviously not feeling well, still.

“Did that soother help at all?” Natalia asked, worried.

Rei shrugged. “A little bit. Took the edge off. Problem is there was more edge behind that one.” He shrugged off his own coat and tossed it on the futon, sitting next to it and gesturing to the office chair in front of his desk. “Sit down.”

Natalia did, her leg bumping a foot locker she’d not noticed at first. Absently she opened the unlocked box, Rei not seeing until she’d already opened. It. “Well… this is a bit more what I was expecting.” Natalia commented with wide eyes.

A dozen knives were slid into sheathes nailed into the roof of the box, with several longer blades, some qualifying as short swords, on the top of the bundled goods inside. Under the swords was at least one suit of Leo patrol armor and a pair of sonic pistols. “My Rei, there are some things you didn’t mention.” She growled.

“Oh come on, it’s not like that.” He groaned. “I stumbled across the guns and armor in the possession of a couple of Ferals I rolled about six months back. I figured there wasn’t any reason to leave it, it might come in useful someday, and out here it’s not like anyone was likely to find it!”

“And if they did, you’d find yourself getting a sonic bolt right to the back of your head.” Natalia yelled. “Would they have been useful then?”

“Owww…” Was Rei’s cringing response, causing Natalia to wince.

“Sorry… but I’d really hate to see you get shot over something you thought ‘might be useful.’”

Rei grunted, and laid back. His headache was no better, and for some reason he was sure that bringing her home with him should have helped with that. His thoughts paused, and he considered that carefully. It didn’t make sense to him, why should bringing her home have helped a headache?

Natalia’s voice ruined his ruminations. “Oh, who’s that?” she asked while standing and walking to the small table next to his futon. She picked up a small, framed photo of a person whose eyes made her think he was Rei standing next to a pretty girl. “An ex-girlfriend?” She asked, slightly annoyed.

“No… geesh, suspicious aren’t you.” Rei grumbled. “That’s my sister. If you scent the photo, you’ll smell me and her on it.”

Natalia did as he suggested and marveled at the mingled scents. She was sure picking his sister out of a crowd would be easy, for her at least, as her scent was amazingly similar to her brothers. Feminine highlights where he had male, with just a little less potency suggesting she wasn’t as high a dan as her sibling.

“Is she an odd jobs girl, too?” Natalia asked.

“No. She’s a geneticist.”

Natalia turned and stared at Rei, though he couldn’t see it since he had thrown his arm over his eyes to block out the light. Geneticists weren’t all that common, the science being held in some contempt by the public after all the varieties of biological and chemical weapons unleashed during the Wars of Madness. More than even Nuclear weapons the human race was still recovering from their use. More than one person suspected that Sirens and Kitsune were caused by some bug or another, unleashed on innocent civilians during the chaos of the wars, though no one had ever proven it.

Due to that, the study of Genetics required someone with a perfect personal record, and a near perfect record for their parents, to even begin to study seriously. From what she’d been told by Rei his family wouldn’t have had the background to allow for such an education, even if she’d managed to get into an advanced program.

Natalia decided to hold off asking about that, for the time being, and instead looked closely at the picture. “I don’t recognize where this was taken. Was that a park in some other district?”

Rei sat up suddenly, at that question, and took the picture out of her hands with a clumsy but lightning quick grab. He froze as he looked at it and she could almost see an internal debate happen inside of him.

Then, for some reason unknown to her, his color improved and the strained expression he’d been suffering faded away. “I know… would you like to meet her?”

“Your sister?”

“Yeah.”

Natalia shrugged. “Sure… but aren’t you feeling bad?”

“Actually… I’m suddenly feeling much better. Weird.” He shrugged, and jumped up to grab his coat. “Come on. Let’s go.”

The entire trip back towards Sydney, Rei had ignored her questions of where they were going or replied with “It’s a surprise.” Natalia found that extremely worrisome.

The sudden disappearance of his headache, and return of his energy, was also suspicious to her. It had taken her most of the ride to Sydney to put her finger on why. “The Siren!” She muttered, just as they entered the tube-way terminal.

“Huh? Where?” Rei looked around the crowd, searching for an albino among the sea of humanity. He spotted an elderly looking one off to the side with a handwritten sign offering to ‘guide’ those, who paid him a small amount of credit, in matters of the heart. He snickered as a pair of teenagers approached the old man nervously. “Oh, that. It’s a common scam, but it works well for the few Sirens who buy into the whole guru thing. Everyone wants to be told that the one they’re with is ‘the one’. Kitsune, of course, kind of know when it happens.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“What are you talking about?” Natalia, who hadn’t seen the fortune teller, asked confused. “And what do you mean Kitsune know?”

It was Rei’s turn to look at her incredulously, and then he grinned. “Oh no. No way am I explaining that! I’ll let you ask Kay.”

“Who the heck is Kay?”

“Oh, sorry. She’s my sister.”

Natalia blinked. “You’re parents named you Rei and Kay? Kind of cruel, don’t you think?”

Rei just shrugged in response.

Before she could ask him several other questions about comments he’d been making, Rei looked at the sign and cursed. “We missed the S-3 shuttle. We’ll have to wait a quarter hour for the next one.”

“Works for me, I need to use the lady’s room.” Natalia said, gesturing towards the door.

“Naw… That stupid thing is broken on this concourse.” Rei stated. “You’ll have to hold it.”

“No it’s not.” Natalia assured the male, pulling him with her to the door. She almost giggled at his look of shock.

“They fixed something? Down here?” Rei swallowed, unconsciously looking around for looming InSec or Leo watchers. “Weird.”

“Just let me slip in. I’ll be back in a minute.” Natalia said, already half through the door and shaking her head. She missed his worried expression as he watched her enter the door.

Natalia took a moment to actually use the facilities before activating her wrist-com once she confirmed the restroom was empty. It seemed Rei wasn’t the only one struggling with the idea of it actually having been repaired.

“Shido here, and if you dialed me in the throws of passion… keep going!”

“Pervert.” Natalia growled. “No. I wanted to see if you guys found the Siren who probed me at the party.”

“Sorry, Talia, but that’s a neg. We searched the next three blocks over, and didn’t find anything. How’s Rei.”

“He’s why I’m calling. The headache cleared up suddenly, and he’s now taking me someplace else, apparently to introduce me to his sister but I’m not sure that’s the case.”

“Why… oh…” Shido had always been a little quicker on the psi-ops side of their business than Natalia herself. “He suddenly got better when he made the decision. You think he got tweaked by the Siren.”

“Yeah. He’s dragging me to Sydney Undercity district 3. Could you get the team together and settle in somewhere down there. I might be wrong, and Rei might just be prone to migraines that suddenly come and go like that, but I do not like how this looks.”

“No problem, dear sister, though frankly if he went to the trouble of taking you home first, he should have at least made a move!”

“Shido!”

“Right, right… I’m on it.”

“Oh, and could you make sure to list Rei on the team’s official witnesses and informants list. It seems he has a few more bad habits then I previously thought.” Natalia grumbled.

“How bad.” Natalia had to smile at the suddenly protective tone in Shido’s voice.

“A propensity for picking up things he shouldn’t have, nothing to nefarious.” She replied.

“Well, okay then. If we don’t hold that against Saki, we can’t hold it against your boyfriend. I’ll rouse the team. If things look harry shock-stick the boy-toy and drag both your asses back to us. We’ll set up in the Leo gondola repair depot in the south quadrant.”

“Thanks Shido.” She disconnected the link, and slipped out. Rei was quickly by her side.

The man looked, for all the world, as though he hadn’t expected her to come out. “Did it actually work?” He asked.

Natalia blinked, raising an eyebrow. “Yes… Why wouldn’t it have?”

Rei didn’t answer, instead eying the door as he pulled her towards the boarding area of the platform. She pondered asking about his queer behavior, but decided against it.

A quick tube ride later they were walking through a truly decrepit section of the Undercity. The eyes of pimps and Ferals made her want to pull out her stick or gun just to remind them of their manners. “Where, exactly, are we going? This doesn’t look like the sort of place that a geneticist would live.”

“It doesn’t, does it?” Rei chuckled, pausing mid step as if a thought had just struck him. She watched him wrestle with whatever it was internally, his expression confused for several moments, before he shook it off and began leading her along again. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck raise.

The hotel they entered was the sort of place she suspected a cheap John would take a hooker, assuming of course they weren’t so cheap as to want to have his fun in an alley somewhere. Privately she suspected that an alley would have been more hygienic.

“Hey, could I rent two oh seven again?” Rei asked. “I loved the view.” The second part sounded sarcastic to her ears, and she expected some sort of sarcastic response from the desk person in return. Instead he looked nervous, and at her.

“Um. You sure? The bathrooms kind of rough.” The man commented, and alarm bells started going off in Natalia’s head, taking over for the slight buzzing of concern she’d been feeling. The man’s tone was clumsy, as if he was looking for an excuse to not give them that room. She realized, suddenly, that what she’d taken as a joke on Rei’s part was a code, or specific request for a specific reason.

“Rei… maybe we could come… later?” Natalia asked, not wanting to continue for more reasons than just concern about a Siren. She suddenly, for some reason she refused to analyze, didn’t want to know more about Rei, at least not until she could warn him that she was with InSec. She knew that very sensation meant she should pursue whatever he wanted to show her, but she didn’t want him to suffer for whatever it was.

She realized that if he was harmed, it would hurt her somewhere very deep inside.

“Just give me the key.” Rei growled, and reluctantly the desk manager handed him a heavy fob and electronic key. Rei turned, and with a hand on her elbow led her up the stairs.

The room they entered was even worse than the desk attendant had suggested. Silently she thanked Gaia that she’d toned down her nose when they first had come Undercity. “What are we…?”

Rei, driven by something internal, had stopped paying attention to Natalia other than to confirm she was with him. He’d crossed over to the painting of an Uppercity spire immediately on closing the room’s door, and waved the fob over it. A door that apparently slid open far too slowly for his satisfaction appeared as if by magic in the wall.

He pulled her into the elevator before she could ask any questions, and hit the button. “Where are we going, Rei. Talk to me.”

He didn’t respond, and his eye’s had gone glassy. “Kay will be excited. She was asking me about you earlier.” He said, though Natalia wasn’t sure if he knew she was even there.

Moments later the doors slid open and, with his hand still firmly gripping her arm, he stepped out onto a gravel path. Natalia found herself at a loss for words, and forgot the questions she’d had only moments ago.

Instead she gazed over the storybook like cavern, filled with little huts which were surrounded by people and birds she thought were chickens, all of whom were going on about their day. As Rei pulled her along, she marveled at the luminescent moss which seemed to replace electric lighting in the fairy cavern she’d found her self in. People nodded at them as they passed, looking at her questioningly but yelling greetings to Rei as though they knew him well.

She realized that they were walking towards a well lit building, odd when compared with the rest of the structures that Natalia could see because it was well lit and modern looking. She heard Rei curse, saying “Now she takes a walk.” as he pulled her suddenly down another path, apparently to intercept two women who were walking away from them.

Once they got close to the women, Rei called out “Hey Kay, you were asking about that girl I met!” and they turned around. Natalia froze and her blood turned to ice.

One woman was the Kitsune from the photo, not terribly changed from the moment that it was taken. The other woman, she realized in horror, was Marigold Sullivan, the nurse from her investigation.

“Rei! What the hell were you thinking?” Natalia heard his sister yelling, though the InSec officer ignored it as the repercussions of what she’d found became clear. “Alexander is going to blow a gasket!”

“Alex… Alexander… but… he doesn’t… do…” Rei’s face, clouded and confused for so long, suddenly cleared. “What… what am I… Natalia! Um… I can explain!”

“You didn’t know you were bringing me here, did you.” Natalia stated, though it could have sounded like a question.

“No.” A grim voice said from behind her. “I made him do it.”

Natalia and Rei both turned, Natalia taking a step back at the cold gaze the Siren who had spoken was giving her. “I am sorry Rei, but you wouldn’t have brought her willingly.”

Then Natalia’s world exploded into a super-nova of pain.