THEY’RE ARRAYED IN A two-winged combat wedge. A plush lobby of darkoak and wine-colored carpet around us, cavelike in its darkness. A low-ceilinged maze of wooden hallways branches in three directions behind them. 6-Teba ticking like a time bomb in my hand as the orange-hot barrel cools. The enforcer’s blade tickling my nose. He thought he’d be aiming at my chest. Shocked instead to see a five-foot tall slave girl standing over the mutilated body of Carto Bask and a faceless corpse, smoking gun in hand.
I palm a fresh ammo cylinder behind my back.
He blinks in confusion, seeing my pink eyes. “Get the Armiger up here, it’s a massacre-”
The enforcer starts to call out to the others before his mind catches up and realizes that Iros are many things, and Gunslingers are not one of them. But I’m faster.
Martial Arts. I whip the 6-Teba in a wax-off motion and bat his blade to the side, using the movement to shuck the spent ammo cylinder. I mastered the sleight of hand for a one-handed reload years ago. I follow through with a pirouette of a kick to the enforcer’s jaw, continuing the motion. The training wheels fail to compensate for my height, so I strike his breastbone instead, driving him back into the others. Two instinctively reach up to catch and halt his fall. Even better. Both Duelists on the wings curve around to strike at me. I drop them first, letting their bodies crash past me into the lift as the nerves connecting their brains to their legs suddenly stop working. The other three don’t even get a chance to regain their footing.
I don’t care if they’re writhing on the floor, dying or just pretending to. I shoot every last one of them. Klaxons howl against my eardrums as I stumble out of the lift, feet squelching through the blood. They know I’m here. Security teams will be pouring towards this floor from every direction. They’ll have learned from the last time I slipped the noose.
I can’t turn around to face the horror waiting back in the lift. Horror I made with my own two hands. I can’t look back. I’ll puke if I do. I stagger into the wall and vomit anyways before I’m two steps out. Hammer my gun into the wall, crying uncontrollably at the insanity. Can’t get the image of Matthias out of my head. I killed him. I killed him with a dream.
Panic constricts my heart as I lurch forward. Deafened by wailing alarms, blinded by fatal purpose, I sprint onwards into certain death.
Flashes of orange color are already flooding towards the next intersection from both sides. I race across without slowing, firing blindly from the hip. Zinging projectiles nick and score my flank. Cut my calves. Carto’s brutalization ruined my good hand. Sarah, ever thoughtful, made sure I could shoot straight with either side in a pinch. I lean hard on her training as I run headlong into the maze of the sixth floor.
Hallways of muted, ominous luxury flow past on either side. The enforcers catch sight of me, give chase until I cut in a random direction, lose me, and catch me again mere moments later. They’re always gaining, never losing ground. My lungs heave, chest expanding and contracting like mad as my body fails to gather the air it needs. Shouts erupt behind me as I swing out onto a long glass-walled corridor that overlooks Orange’s main central road. Wide pillars stripe the carpet with shadow. Hordes of black-robed fighters run towards the base of the tower like ants returning to their nest. Airborne affinities rocket out of the district in comets of color and light. A few of them point up, and beams of ki blasts start splashing against the glass, melting it to slop.
I whip my head to the left as I blow right past another intersection, hair billowing out in a ragged tail behind me. Another part of my heart shrivels when I see yet another pack of enforcers racing to intercept. A doomed chuckle works its way out of me. How familiar this situation is. I had my chance to get away. Now the noose tightens, and there is no escaping it this time. So I sprint onwards into death, ducking back towards the interior of the tower as another platoon of enforcers swings into view ahead; heads low and bodies hunched, jaguars with blood in their sights.
Deeper into the web. Deeper. Count the turns in my head, only shoot when I have to. The shouts grow ever closer on all sides. I’m running so fast I trip and skin my face raw on the carpet before righting myself in a microsecond on nerves powered by raw adrenaline. The near misses start becoming more near, less misses. The jaws close from every side. But I’m not worried anymore. Because even when I stumble around the final corner into a fifty-meter long straightaway along the back of the tower and see a platoon of enforcers closing their pincer from the other direction, I’ve been counting the turns since the lift. And I have made it.
Halfway down the corridor looms a doorway unlike any other in the Orange. It is intricate, not large; an opulence with vision that could only belong to one person. I sprint right towards it, fearlessly ignoring the sudden jostling in the mob of enforcers rushing me from the fore. I know what it means. The outwards swaying of the bodies like desert grass as a predator of a different caliber slips through at incredible speed, Sarah’s Sixer raised like a tail above the stalks. Then he breaks out of the pack in a hunched sprint and the black-white revolver takes aim. No flash, no flair, no shouts or challenges. The helm of the anubis, Wishbone’s white cape draped down one shoulder, anyman’s plain armor; a javelin of a human who exists for the single purpose of executing others’ wills.
The Armiger is too far to stop me from reaching his master, so he takes a single shot, and it is as accurate as every other he’s made. A white nail of pain slams into the back of my bad shoulder. Gasping in pain, I let the momentum spin me so I’m flat against a grand threshold pillar of the Executor’s quarters. I jiggle the doorknob with my knee. Ancient oldTech, unlocked.
Ducking a fireball that rips the oxygen from the air as it screams out from the enforcers chasing behind, I steady my breath, in half-out, and smash open the door. 6-Teba at my waist, sweeping from corner to corner, slipping inside and using my back to slam the door shut in the same motion. I lock it the instant before the jaws slam shut behind me.
Bloodied, snapped wrist, burned and shot to hell, I look upon my destination. The cluttered room cascades from the muraled walls beside me through a junkyard of opened anatomical tomes filled with elaborate medical sketches of the brain, depictions of pressure points and chakras. Awry projections cover chalkboards filled corner to corner with arcane mathematic symbols I’ve never seen. Hastily hammered shelves of bottled plants in every stage of growth and decay line the walls, ending at an open-air view of a chasm straight to the Abyss. We’re at the edge of the block. Nothing but that immense black gap until the next block over picks up some thirty meters beyond. Curtains of runoff rain cascade between. Ambient light paints the room in citrine color. A paper-mâché model of a foreign star system tacked to the ceiling hangs over a brutalist marble desk. The polished stone is littered with artifacts that send a shiver down my skin.
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Two pink, catlike eyes watch me from a clear glass jar; optic nerves like bloody plant roots. A single onyx bangle with carved angel wings sprouting from the wrist. A blindfold. A shell casing. A child’s stuffed elephant leans against the side of the desk. A book with no pages, and hovering above it, a hexagonal JOY that constantly shifts and rotates its colored sides like a chameleon. Center of them all, eighteen pieces of parchment inked with numbers and signs of foreign origin surround a potted bonsai lily like prostrate worshippers. The flower is missing half its petals. And with a snip of a nail clipper, the freakish creature sitting behind it claims another still, letting the lone white petal slowly float to rest on the desk.
The Executor is a parody of everything I expected. Going by the Eight’s descriptions, I expected a queen on a throne of bones, a maniacal monarch. But she- if it even is a she- is tiny, androgynous, and aberrant. A doll-like savant of the Modd class, one of the less useful but more popular specializations. Yet where the people I’ve seen use the affinity stopped at giving themselves claws, ears, and tails; the Executor let her JOY consume and replace her entire form. There’s nothing human left of the thing before me.
Slippery white skin and a vaguely aquatic form, thin limbs and large features, make her general shape. Large, drooping fleshy ears rise above her head, forming the hood of a contiguous flap of skin that washes down her small back like a meaty slab of hair. The languid patience of an apex feline dangling a rat by the tail fills her two true eyes; both orange-gold and lurking beneath heavy lids and slick membranes. A third eye, just a slit in her forehead, remains shut as the authority of her presence rises from the plant to me with all the hurry of an IV drip.
“Hello again, child,” she purrs in a singsong voice.
Those large eyes watch me with casual curiosity. Her diminutive height, flawless porcelain skin, the way her little padded feet kick around the stool like a child; they would have me believe the thing before me is no older than I am. But one look into that ancient gaze sets the record straight. The sinful weight in those eyes bespeaks an intelligence centuries in the making. This is a monster with more blood on her hands than any warlord of the Vents.
“We’ve never met,” I pant. “Though I sure would have liked to before tonight. I could’ve saved the Vents a whole lot of trouble.”
“Is that so, mhm?” The Executor leans forward, cupping her jawline in two tiny hands. “A candle truly does flicker most violently just before it extinguishes. You sound so very certain of yourself. Risking life and limb on a suicidal quest, sacrificing your companion just to reach humble little me… you must truly believe me evil. Tell me, what terrible acts have I committed that are worth sacrificing so much to stop? Since you haven’t pulled that trigger yet.”
A shiver runs through me as she continues to sit there, patiently ignoring the 6-Teba even as I pull back the hammer. Like she’s been waiting for me all along, and she knows I’m not going to pull the trigger with such overwhelming certainty, because she’s already thinking so much further beyond this moment. Beyond the moment where her enforcers breach the room and put a blade in my heart. Beyond the day the Vents collapses to her machinations. Beyond the only world I’ve ever known. It’s not normal. She should be pleading. Enraged that I’ve got a gun in her face and a finger on the trigger. Begging for me to spare her life. They all do. But she doesn’t. All the pieces of this room, of her, they’re not even parts of the same puzzle.
My hand starts to shake from the pain. Face tightening with hate as I bring the gun back up again. “You know exactly why I’m here.”
“Haha! I suppose that’s true.” Sighing, the Executor traces a fingertip over the potted flower, looking above and behind me at something I can’t see. At you. “I do indeed know why you’re here, little lost child. Though I imagine you do not.”
She’s not fazed when fists and weapons start hammering against the other side of the door. The Armiger’s filtered voice barks out a command. Instead of replying, the Executor smiles and taps a button under her desk, and a half-foot sheathe of semi-liquid metal swallows the entire wall behind me.
“There! Some privacy for us.” She chuckles when I flinch away from the aberrant metal. “Don’t worry child, it doesn’t bite. It’s one of Crucible’s atomic chameleon alloys, mhm? Foils those pesky Elementals we keep on retainer by altering its atomic weight and reimagining the material itself when a JOY attempts to exert its will upon it.” She frowns when a glowing point of red begins blossoming in the center of the wall. “Though, I suppose a plasma cutter doesn’t particularly care for the difference. Hammers and nails, hm?”
“Enough!” I snap. “Stop fucking around with me!”
“You’re finally picking up on it? Good girl,” she coos.
A clap of thunder shatters both our composures as I pull the trigger, blowing a hole through the center of her desk. The kinetic kickback scatters the sheafs of paper in every direction. Like leaves, they slowly drift to the ground one by one, the last falling across my foot. “Next one’s going between your eyes unless you tell me why you just blocked your guards.”
“Why? Why?” The right half of the Executor’s face twitches in a micro-seizure, her humor entirely evaporated by the gunpowder oozing into the air. “The answer is simple. Because my favorite watchdog is trying to melt his way through the other side of that wall right now, and he would make a dead body of you faster than you could blink.” A languid sigh releases between her pursed lips, the playful tone slowly returning to her voice. “Because from the moment you came barging into my office, even from the moment you entered my territory with the intent to see my well-wrinkled brain matter spilled across a conveniently polished surface, child, your heart has been convicted by misinformation.” Tiny gloves hands steeple beneath her chin, the bonsai plant forgotten. “Because, my dear, I wish only to clear my name. You believe me the harbinger of evil itself, do you not? The killer of your surrogate mother? The mastermind of your home’s dark future, mhm? A monster with a vision incalculable, as that reprobate Kun Kharsa so ineloquently put it?”
“Try all of those at once.”
“Yet I assure you, the truth couldn’t be further from such things.” Two of her fingers press against an overturned paper, slowly walking along the margin. “Since the very first page of our little tale, you have been deceived, child. Word by word…” her fingers do a little skip, “…line by line. Of all, only I have not lied to you.”
“You think I’d ever believe you didn’t kill Sarah? When I watched your watchdog pull the trigger?” I glance over my shoulder, barking out a callous laugh. The superheated spot has swollen to the size of a watermelon. My vision returns to her, gunmetal cold. “You’re not talking your way out of this.”
“What would it take for you to believe me, lost child? I tire of this banter. Your vision is a monochrome blinded to the nuanced colors of reality.”
My finger tightens against the trigger. “Try a little harder.”
The Executor spreads her hands plaintively. A circular dataslip the size of a gambling chip appears in her palm. “I can only offer the truth. I did not kill Sarah Morninghawk.”
“Then who did?”
She slides the dataslip across the desk and leans back, a Chesire grin growing on her face.
“Would you like to find out?”