Chapter Three

Rei walked several paces behind Marigold: the magnetic rails of a transit tube-way only a hand’s breadth above his head. Only part of him was paying attention to walking, or the girl. Most of it was taken up by the conversation they’d had in the maintenance crawlway.

Marigold claimed to be a nurse, right out of the Sidney Central Hospital. Usually working in the emergency room, she’d gone into nursing to save lives. At least, that was what she had said.

Normally she’d have no reason to leave her precious ER, nor did she have authorization to enter high security sections of the hospital like the incinerator room. A girlfriend of hers from nurse’s training had needed a night off for her anniversary, so Marigold had offered to take her shift in the long-term care wing. When the Floor Nurse had handed her a keycard and ordered her to pull a cart of sharps left by the day shift down to the incinerator she didn’t argue, not wanting to get either her or her friend into trouble with the older woman, even by pointing out she wasn’t authorized to go there yet. She figured the other nurse knew.

Rei could buy that happening easily enough, even with the nearly pandemic fear of biological waste left over from the weapons used during the Wars of Madness a century ago. He’d benefited from other people’s laziness often enough in the past. It’s what happened next that seemed unbelievable, even to a cynic like him.

She’d gotten down to the security door and opened it to find the InSec Officer usually present absent from his desk. Knowing she had to check the waste in with him, she had called out, and even poked her head into the incinerator room to find him.

That is where, she claimed, she found the infant she was carrying now.

Even then it was luck, from what she had described. The bag, and Rei refused to ponder what kind of sick mind would shove a living baby into a plastic bag, had been left on top of a pile of burnable waste, and had fallen open wide enough to allow the child to breathe. She’d rushed in and pulled the child out, only to discover that what she had thought was a simple mistake had been an intentional act of execution.

That’s when she left the hospital and drew the officially mandated execution squads.

Rei fingered the biological waste disposal tag, the very proof that Marigold had found in the bag with the baby, with absent horror. He read the biohazard warnings, looking at the bright red symbols warning of death and sickness before flipping it over. In the messy scrawl of a doctor was written the name “Baby boy Weatherly” where the tag demanded a description of the waste to be destroyed. It sent a chill up Rei’s spine that, instead of a birth certificate, this was the only official documentation of the child’s birth.

True, rumors of governmental plans to kill off both Kitsune and Siren populations were nothing new. Urban legends of racially motivated death squads, suicide missions for military teams of both in the field, and even secret sterilization programs abounded. He could count on one hand, in sobering realization, the number of Sirens he knew and all of them were either ex-military or home births from the poorest of Undercity neighborhoods.

The high-pitched whine, nearly inaudible even to him, of the electromagnetic rails warming up pulled him out of his thoughts. He surged forward and pulled Marigold down to the tunnel’s filthy floor. Thirty seconds later a tube train, the maglev subway used to connect all the parts of the city, roared overhead at over 500 kilometers per hour.

Rei frowned down at the silent, sleeping baby in the nurse’s arms. “Are you sure he’s okay? I ain’t an expert, or anything, but even I want to cry out when one of those lousy things goes by. Shouldn’t he be screaming?”

“I stole some sedatives on the way out of the hospital. Their risky with such a young infant, but I couldn’t take the chance of him crying while we ran away.”

“Why were you so sure that Pinky represents some big plot? I mean, you’re right, and the tag was creepy as hell, but it could just be some sicko in the hospital.” Rei asked, denial making him want to prove it was all just a mistake.

Marigold looked away, a flash of sadness filling her eyes as she did. “This child was the only one I found alive… not the only child I found.” She whispered, before beginning to trudge silently down the walk path again.

“Oh,” Was the only response Rei could muster.

He let them walk on for another fifteen minutes, neither one of them speaking the entire time. He only broke the quiet when he saw the lights of a station ahead of them. “Do you have your cred-chip?” He asked.

“Yes… but wouldn’t they be watching for it?”

The man nodded, pleased she had realized that. “Obviously. However, not everyone knows that. Now hand it over.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Curious and reluctant Marigold handed her chip over. Rei smiled, and gestured for her to sit and wait for him there in the tunnel. He then walked to the track maintenance hatch a few meters further down the path. A few moments, and one more stolen code later, he was on the crowded platform.

After over an hour of solitude with only the pensive Marigold, an unconscious baby, and his thoughts to keep him company the sudden press of humanity was jarring. Hundreds of factory laborers rubbed shoulders with dozens of suited office workers. Twelve food carts, islands of madness amid a sea of human chaos, played automated ads advertising everything from hot dogs that might just have been made from dogs to okinomiaki whose meat might have conceivably been made from protein, in hopes of making a sale. The scent of human sweat mingling with the misted anti-pathogenic sprays used by the Public Health Authorities to prevent the spread of disease among such crowds assaulted his sensitive nose as much as the sight of the crowd and the sound of the barkers attacked his other senses.

And all of this was at one AM. Rei could only thank whatever devil pretended to be a god that he wasn’t fighting the morning rush.

Rei pushed through the crowd, deeper onto the platform. He only had to drive one fist into the face of a poorly trained pickpocket before he reached his destination.

A lady’s restroom, marked out of order with a cheap paper sign that had yellowed with age.

He slid into the door, closing it, which effectively blocked the sound of the crowd outside. “Mulligan, are you here?” Rei called out as he stepped into the room proper.

Two thugs, mountains of muscle topped by heads like fists, glared at him even as the tiny woman he sought appeared from the handicapped stall she used as an office. “Rei? Um… This isn’t about that cred-chip I sold you, is it? I swear I had no idea…”

“That it was burnt, or that I’d have to take a three-story header out of a Leo gondola?” Rei finished for her, causing the woman to wince. “I should hope not.”

“Still… If you’re looking to get even…” The woman eyed her muscle, looking far less sure of herself than she should.

“If I was, they’d already be bleeding on the linoleum.” Rei assured her, disregarding the two heavies’ snarls. He was far more interested, and satisfied, in the new pallor of Mulligan’s skin.

She knew him well. Her thugs didn’t know him at all.

“No.” Rei continued, after letting the threat sink in. “I find myself with a green class cred-chip and a desperate need for a clean one that I myself can use.”

“Why not use that one?” Mulligan asked, suspiciously. “I know your ways, and know you wouldn’t bring it to me unless you were desperate.”

In response he handed the green plastic device over to Mulligan. A spinning electronic picture of the petite Marigold was clear to see. “I’m good and shifty, but that’s a bit out of even my ability to play pretend, don’t you know?”

“I don’t know. You’d look good as a blond.” The suddenly more confident Mulligan snickered. “But all I have is a Red Chip.”

“Mulligan!”

“Okay, okay… I have a yellow.” She admitted, suddenly nervous again. “You have a pic?”

“I can load it. Give me the card.” Rei barked. He didn’t trust her to not screw up coding the picture, and he was more than decent with a computer himself.

Mulligan dashed back into her stall, returning moments later with a yellow cred-chip, the micro-screen set into the yellow plastic absent of any spinning imagery.

“Good doing business with you.” Rei said pleasantly. His only regret was that he couldn’t be there when Mulligan, or whatever high-end client of hers, used the chip and had the wrath of hell fall on their heads. Revenge was a dish best served cold, or so he’d heard.

He backed out of the bathroom, the thugs choosing not to take the invitation to attack offered by his feral smile to them as he exited. Only minutes after entering, he found himself back out in the crowd with what he needed.

Unfortunately, that was the last thing to go right.

Almost the instant he turned away from the door he came face to face with Marigold’s image on a news screen. The scroll underneath outlined her theft of unidentified “dangerous biological substances” from the Central Hospital, and her murder of three security officers in the process of leaving. He questioned the count of three dead, but didn’t take the time to worry about it.

Stepping away from the wall and grabbing the stocking cap from a drunken man’s head, he was careful to neither look around nor run, since both would just draw notice he really didn’t want right now. The cursing, he knew, would go unnoticed by the crowd.

Marigold was on him when, almost ten minutes later, he stepped out of the service hatch. “What took you so long? I was afraid you had abandoned me!”

“Shut it for a second.” Rei snapped, ripping the cap from his head, and holding it out to her. “Put this on.”

“What… why?”

“Because you are painted all over the news screens.” He was gratified by her gasp and look of near panic. “I know a place we can go where you’ll be safe, but we need to use the train to get there and your hair is a bit too eye catching.”

“What about you?” Marigold asked. “What if someone saw us together?”

“I need a few minutes of quiet.” He replied, sinking down to the dirty concrete and closing his eyes.

“Why?” Marigold asked, causing him to open them again to glare up at her. “Right, right… quiet. Sorry.”

Rei closed his eyes again and concentrated on the feeling of himself. After only a few seconds of concentration he could feel the cloth against his skin and the cool tunnel air on his face with an intensity that only he, and people like him, could understand.

Once he was centered, he focused his attention on his hair, or more precisely the still living core of his hair. While human hair was, essentially, dead matter that wasn’t the case for him. Only the outer shell and about an inch past the tip of the core were actually waste, with the inner core being a mix of nerves and tissue. It hurt like hell when someone pulled on it, or it was cut, but it also allowed him to control several facets of his hair, including its color.

Neither he, nor others like him, had ever found the language to describe the feel of color. All they knew was it could be felt, and after he found that particular wavelength of tingling, he let it go.

A minute after he closed his eyes the last of the tingling passed, and with a shake of his head and a running of his hands through his hair, he cleared the dust from his formerly brown mane. He fished a lady’s compact out of a coat pocket and peered at himself in the mirror. “Hey, I do look good as a blond!”

He looked up at Marigold, and barely resisted the urge to burst out laughing at the pole axed expression she wore.

“You… You’re a Kitsune!”