Chase had never seen the inside of a CIU vehicle before. He expected a parade of bells and whistles, boards full of dials, radios and specialised devices, maybe a compartment specifically designed to keep jam donuts at the perfect temperature where the jam remained oozy but wouldn’t burn your tongue.

He was disappointed. It was just a car.

It didn’t help that Kim’s old sergeant, Jamieson, was a plain-clothes detective. He wouldn’t be driving around in a decked-out police car while casing a drug lab or whatever it was that he did.

“What were you thinking?” Kim demanded. She was incomparable to the person he’d met at Pelafro Lake, the easy-going accomplice who lugged him into a refrigerator-cum-restaurant that happened to serve boba tea. This was Kim on a mission; direct, scrupulous, and damn-well pissed off. She leaned around from the front seat while Jamieson drove. “Associating with any of the people in the Market could get you charged with obstruction of justice, financing crime, accomplice to a bunch of shit, or just get you plain killed. Why, Chase? What the fuck?”

They’d left Rudy in the dirt outside the tunnel, claiming they were just there to ‘pick up’ Chase. Jamieson did a damn good job of posing as a gangster, so Rudy didn’t have any qualms with the arrangement. At least, he hadn’t sent Chase any accusatory messages thus far.

“This feels weird, Kim. Am I like, on the record or something? Do I need a lawyer before I talk to you?”

Kim gave him a look like she might strangle him, then returned to the front half of the car and crashed down in a huff. “We’re not arresting you, Chase, we’re fucking saving you. You didn’t buy anything while you were there, right? Please tell me you didn’t buy anything.”

He stayed silent. Kim launched out of her seat to glare at him yet again, forcing out an answer. He nodded towards Jamieson with a silent question.

Can I say it in front of him?

“Speak freely,” the detective said. “I can see you in the rear-vision, anyway. You bought something.”

“Wait, no, I haven’t paid for it yet!” Chase said. “And even if I had, it wouldn’t be traceable. They don’t use Credits; it’s all done with gold. Ka— the person I was paid said something about the market going up this morning? She weighed the gold and converted the price on the spot.”

“So you did pay for it?” Jamieson mused.

“No, sorry, it’s a long and kind of weird story. I thought I’d pay with Credits, but when I found out they use gold, my friend stepped in for me. I’ll reimburse him later.”

“But you haven’t paid your friend yet?” Kim interjected.

“No.”

“Thank fuck.”

The car went silent as they drove, aside from the occasional comment from Kim and Jamieson as they worked through the information.

“Gold’s interesting,” Jamieson said. “Can’t believe we didn’t think of that.”

“System transactions might be private,” Kim said, “but bank records aren’t. My guess is the kinds of people who sell illegal weapons might be sceptical of institutions like that. Makes sense, once you see it.”

“Mhm.”

Chase sat in the back, watching out the window as they weaved through the streets on the way to Four Town. While they were stopped at a red light, he watched a group of families gathered at a playground. The parents were covering a long bench in a red and white polka-dotted tablecloth while the younger kids swung across monkey bars and zipped down slides. The older kids were arranging paper plates on the bench and putting a bread roll on each so they wouldn’t blow away in a sudden gust of wind.

The peaceful, familial setting blurred before his eyes like a movie fading to black. He didn’t care for it — he’d had a taste of the power that bigger weapons could bring, and now all he wanted was to harness and use it.

He still wanted the MP7A2.

Really wanted it.

“So you guys are sure I’m not in trouble? Like, pinky promise?”

“You’re clean,” Jamieson answered. “Even without all the nice things Kim said about you, I wouldn’t bring you in. You’re small fry in a huge operation. No point alerting the big dogs that we’re onto them.”

Kim shrank down in her seat, and he saw her glance at him from her side mirror. He grinned, and she gave him the middle finger.

Lovely.

“Nice things, huh? Care to elaborate?”

“No,” Kim interjected. “He would not like to elaborate in the slightest.”

For the first time, Jamieson’s rugged, heavy face cracked a smile. It was like seeing a boulder split across the middle, revealing a set of pearly whites. He glanced through the rear vision and winked at Chase.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

“Anyway, you two can’t come back to headquarters with me, especially you, Kim. Where do you want to be dropped?”

Chase grimaced. At that specific moment, he wanted to be dropped at least five kilometres from the nearest Kim Seo-ah.

*******

The cashier plonked the two drinks on the counter and spat out the price in a monotone voice. “Twelve-fifty.”

Chase paid, took the two iced coffees and walked outside to where Kim was sitting. It had taken them a while to find a café that didn’t look like a front for mobster activities, and by the time they did, there was a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. He set down Kim’s drink and sat opposite her on a rickety woven fibre chair.

“How much do I owe you?” Kim asked.

“Nothing, don’t worry about it. I think I owe you a lot more than an iced coffee.”

He spooned some of the whipped cream off the top and tried to eat it in a somewhat graceful manner. A gust of wind blew a smidgen of cream off the top of his spoon and smacked it onto his nose, making him flinch.

“Deserved,” Kim said. She handed him a serviette while stifling a laugh. This sarcastic, casual version of Kim was much preferable to the stern CIU-operative he’d met earlier.

“That was intentional,” Chase countered. “The cream tastes better if you inhale it — really ignites the senses.”

“Ah-ha. I dread to think what you might do with the bar of chocolate they’ve jammed in these.”

Chase laughed. “I think you already know.”

He sipped at the coffee, enjoying the ice-cold drink and imagining the rejuvenation flowing through his veins. It wasn’t as luxurious of an experience as the boba tea, but at least he was done being interrogated.

Now it was his turn to do the honours.

“So what’s the deal? I thought you were a GRA gal — seems a bit odd for you to be hanging out with a CIU detective.”

Kim bit a chunk off her cream-and-coffee-dunked chocolate bar, shrugging. “It’s off the books. A passion project, I guess. There wasn’t enough dirt on you for the GRA to investigate, especially since we didn’t have clear evidence that you were even part of a guild. Embassy didn’t want anything to do with it either. I was still curious, so I contacted Jamieson to see if he could help.”

“And he was allowed?”

Again, Kim shrugged. “He’s got a decent bit of leeway these days. Had the option to go for Captain or continue as a detective and pick his choice of cases. Worse pay, but he chooses how he works and what-not. Same retirement benefits too, which helps.”

“I’m sure it would,” Chase said. He’d heard some wild tales about pensions and retirement funds when it came to government agencies. The numbers sometimes made him wish he was a bureaucrat rather than a Hunter.

Only sometimes, though.

“And what’ll you do now?” he continued. “You’re not going to storm the place or something, right? There’s a lot of guns down there, and at least a hundred people who aren’t afraid to use them.”

He pictured Kim in full combat gear, a riot shield on one arm and a pistol in the other as she charged down the tunnel into the Market. He got the feeling that Big Joe would be in for a hell of a surprise.

“Well, now that I know you’re not gonna be caught up in the shit-storm, we might take it to the big dogs — organise a raid or something. Shut that shit down.”

“I see.” He suddenly realised he had a burning question, something that had confused him ever since he stepped out of that spacious yet still choking tunnel and saw Kim looking down at him. “Wait, how did you know I was at the Market? And coming out of that tunnel?”

Kim reddened and slurped at the final dregs of her coffee for a while. “Umm, I was…uh…following you? You were a suspect, so I just chased the case.”

“How long?”

She chewed the corner of her lip and looked into the air. The fact that she had to calculate the timeframe astounded Chase. He’d been on edge, looking over his shoulder and watching out for anything suspicious ever since leaving his and Gramps’ apartment. Unless Kim was snaffled away in a bush and wearing a ghillie suit, he had no idea how he’d missed her.

“Since you left your place…” She paused to gauge Chase’s reaction. “I sat behind you on the train, actually. Bit of a slip-up there, but I decided I was pretty safe once you started to nod off.”

“I wasn’t nodding o— oh, actually.” Maybe his counter-surveillance wasn’t airtight. There were certainly gaps in his memory of that train ride.

“Anyway,” Kim continued, “Once you hopped off at Seven Town I already knew where you were going. The Market was on my radar back at the CIU, and with that gash on your calf, it all came together like a bowl of soup.”

Chase leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest and nearly tipping over the back of the miserable wobbly chair.

“Shit.”

“Ya. My advice is to not do criminal shit anymore. You’re not great at it.”

“Well thanks.”

Kim chuckled, leaning across the table to poke at him. “Don’t get mad about it. It’s a good thing — you’ve got good morals, and you’re too nice to live that life. If you robbed someone, you’d probably feel so bad that you’d rock up on their doorstep the next day with all their stuff in a neat little pile with a thankyou note and a box of chocolates on top. You’re a good guy, Chase. I wouldn’t have said yes to a second date if you weren’t.”

Chase blushed, unfolding his arms to swat at Kim. “Well I’m sorry the third one hasn’t gone so well. Coffee’s good, at least.”

Kim rose to her feet and offered Chase a hand. “I’ll agree it was a rocky start, but it’s not over yet, is it?”

“I guess not.”

*******

Rudy was never the top of his class in school. He didn’t go to university, he didn’t know how to play chess, and he preferred first-person shooters over strategy games. His personal argument was that all those things were for nerds and people with glasses (two groups which seemed to share some common ground, at least according to his favourite old movies) and he wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.

On occasion, his friends would tell him in a very eloquent way, ‘You don’t know shit about fuck.”

But Rudy wasn’t stupid.

He didn’t believe for one second that the gloomy old bugger and his pretty young plaything were just there to ‘pick up’ Chase. Rudy knew mobsters, and he would sooner suck a dozen eggs than believe that those two posers had ever killed a man. They’d never smuggled drugs into the high-roller parties in One City, like he had. They’d never experienced the thrill and fear of chasing down a rival gang member caught in the wrong territory, or been that misplaced miscreant themselves.

No, they were just run-of-the-mill weaklings who thought that monsters were the only threat, and that Hunters were all they needed to protect them. They lived their lives completely ignorant of the second side of the coin.

His side.

He watched the black car slink away with Chase shrivelled down in the back seat. The pretty one spun around to face him, but Rudy couldn’t divine her intentions because she was faced the other direction.

Either way, it didn’t matter. The second they were out of sight, he flew back down the tunnel to The Market. He had seven thousand Credits on the line and a nagging feeling that he might not be recovering them.

Perhaps he had been stupid to let the kid go without coughing up the money first. But that wasn’t a big deal, he decided.

He’d exact what was owed to him, one way or another.