> I will never forget the day the world changed. A bright flash of light, a sudden feeling of impending doom, and then all hell broke loose. I survived. Others didn’t. I’m not sure who was luckier.
Jeremiah Braddock III
I tore through the alley, ignoring the trash piled against the walls as I clutched my ill-gotten gains to my chest. Behind me, my pursuers’ steps pounded against the pavement, splashing through the puddles of water and who-knew-what-else that had gathered in the alley. As I passed, I dragged a nearby trashcan behind me, and I was rewarded with the sound of a man tripping over the aluminum barrel. The others were not so easily deterred, though.
Not that I expected such a thing to work, of course. The men behind me were all at least Tier-2, and they had cybernetic enhancements to boot. If I’d known they would chase me, I never would have dreamed of stealing from Farooq in the first place. I glanced down at the package in my hands, realizing just how inaccurate that thought really was. Even if I ended up getting caught, it was worth it.
Of course, that wasn’t Plan A. Or Plan B. Or really, any plan in the alphabet. I guess what I’m saying is that I didn’t want to get caught. But then again, who does? It’s not like any thief sets out to be caught, right? Sometimes, though, it’s unavoidable.
Like right now.
Before I could get to the end of the alley and blend in with the crowd of pedestrians in the main street, I felt a meaty hand clamp down on my shoulder. I tried to duck away, but his grip was like iron. No – wait. Upon further reflection, it wasn’t just like iron. It was literal metal. Which was my first hint that I’d royally made a huge mistake.
Or maybe like the third or fourth hint, following closely after Farooq screaming at me and a trio of hulking mouth-breathers chasing after me. So, third hint. Either way, I was screwed, because I knew just who that hand belonged to.
With those metallic fingers digging into shoulder, I skidded to a stop, then promptly fell on my ass. Water and – oh, God that doesn’t smell like water – splashed, covering me in muck.
“Ow! Fuck. Shit! Ow!” I sputtered, trying not to think about what, exactly, the semi-liquid was. I looked up at the figure who’d suddenly topped my list of most-hated people in Nova City. It had a proper name, of course – Mega-City South – but it used to be called New Orleans. That was almost a century ago, though. Now, everyone just called it Nova. Yeah – not the most creative, but then again, people – and their naming conventions – are like that.
I turned to glare at my nemesis, and even though I was still furious and annoyed that I’d been caught, that fire only lasted for a few seconds before it was quelled by the sheer degree of trouble I was in. Instead of some nameless mook, I found myself looking up at Turk James, a veritable mountain of muscle and metal who any sane thief would avoid like the nano-rot. And judging by the look on his face, I’d gone and put myself on his bad side.
“Give it back,” he growled, one of his eyes glowing red. His other was mostly black, though instead of an iris, it had a white skull. Original? No. Not even the least bit. But it was definitely intimidating enough to send a shiver of fear up my spine. “Now.”
I clutched the package to my chest. After spending the last five minutes sprinting through the Garden– so named because it was home to the Silos where most of the city’s food was grown – I was in no mood to give up my hard-won treasure. Even if it meant getting my legs broken by some edgy asshole with a fetish for metal appendages.
“No!” I spat, pushing myself away. I only got a few inches before his metal hand found my hair. Damn me for unbraiding it, right? But at least it didn’t stink. Most of the time. You know – when it wasn’t covered in muck and being used as a leash. “Ow. Fuck! Let me go!”
He didn’t. Because, obviously, right? He’d been chasing me for a half-dozen blocks; he wasn’t going to let me go just because I threw a few swears his way.
“Uh…boss?” said one of the men who’d followed Turk. He was just as tall as the man who had a death grip on my hair, but he was probably half his weight. Like Turk, though, he had a cybernetic appendage – this time, a leg. Then and there, I labeled him Pegleg. “You recognize her, right?”
Turk dragged me to my feet and then, onto my tiptoes. My feet were barely scraping the pavement, and it set my scalp on fire with the pain. Hair wasn’t supposed to support a person’s entire body weight, apparently. Good to know, but if I’m honest, probably not the most important thing to consider, given the circumstances. Said circumstances being that I had an angry cyborg staring me in the face.
“What’s your name?” he growled. Did he have any other tone? Or more importantly, had he ever heard of dental hygiene? Because his breath was terrible, and that was me being nice. The other way would’ve had me using words like “rotting corpse” or “sewage mouth”. Then again, considering that his teeth were entirely metal – and probably his jaw, too – I had to wonder if he even had to worry about cavities. If push came to shove – and shove was right on the horizon, from what I could smell – he could just replace the whole thing.
“Uh…”
“Go on, girl – spit it out,” he ordered, his metal teeth clacking together with every word. I hated that I was close enough to hear it. The sound wasn’t so bad, but being so close meant that it came with the smell. And like I said, gross.
“That’s Jeremiah’s niece,” supplied Pegleg. “You know who she is.”
My heart leapt into my throat. The last thing I needed was for them to run off and tell my uncle what I’d been doing. Whatever they had in mind as punishment couldn’t have been as bad as what he would do to me. But then again, the moment I thought back to the package still in my hands, I thought it was worth it.
“That so, kid?” he said, a slight smile playing across his face. God – he knew, didn’t he? He knew that I was way more afraid of my uncle than I ever could’ve been of him. And rightly so, given that the cyborg, as obviously powerful as he was, was probably just as scared of my Uncle Jeremiah as I was.
“Just…just let me go,” I said, summoning every ounce of courage I possessed. It was probably enough to fill a thimble. “And I won’t…I won’t tell anyone about this…uh…misunderstanding. Got it?”
For a moment, I thought my bluff would work. After all, everyone in the Garden was terrified of my uncle. Was it right to leverage that into getting away? Maybe not. But I was still a week away from getting my Nexus Implant, so it was the only reasonable thing I could do to escape.
“Maybe we should just let her go,” said the third member of the chase-a-teenage-girl-through-the-streets-club. He was short and a little pudgy, with a bald head and the dubious distinction of having no obvious cybernetics. I bet they made fun of him for that. You know, when they weren’t threatening teenagers. “I don’t want to get on his bad side. You know what they call him, right? You’ve heard the stories.”
“I ain’t scared of Jeremiah,” Turk said. “Besides, he’ll probably thank us for bringing this little street rat back home. I heard he’s been lookin’ for her.”
“For why?” asked Pegleg.
“Rumor is that she done run off,” said Vanilla. Yes – I’d dubbed the guy without cybernetics Vanilla. In my defense, he was white. And probably liked ice cream, I guess? And I was doing everything I could not to have my hair ripped out of my skull. So, I think I should get a little bit of slack.
“Run off? From where?” was Pegleg’s next question. Clearly, he wasn’t the brains of the operation. Turk wasn’t either. And Vanilla? Please. Maybe nobody was the brains, which kind of explained how an unawakened teenager was able to elude them for more than six blocks.
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“From her uncle, idiot,” Turk said, slapping Pegleg in the back of the head. Immediately, the man reacted, his arm exploding into moving parts that resolved themselves into the barrel of a gun. All around the metallic cylinder were the splayed parts of Pegleg’s left arm, held in place by various rods and wires.
“I told you not to hit me no more!” the man spat, his weasel-like features distorting with anger. Perhaps I should've beneficently bestowed a new moniker, changing his name from Pegleg to Weasel. I wondered if he’d be grateful. Probably not.
Turk rolled his inhuman eyes. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had any special features; likely, they were just cosmetic, though. Even if he was Tier-3, he was just some mid-level mook, and there was almost no way he could afford functional optics. In any case, he followed his eyeroll up by slapping the man’s arm-gun away. Pegleg – or did I decide to call him Weasel? Moreover, why do I even care? – tried to resist, but he clearly wasn’t on Turk’s level, because he couldn’t stop himself from tumbling to the ground. I was satisfied to see that he was soon covered in the same disgusting liquid that coated my own legs. Served him right, as far as I was concerned.
Obviously, all wasn’t right in the land of mooks and cyborgs, because, with a growl, Vanilla launched himself at Turk. As he did so, a pair of blades extended from his forearms. Despite being on the wrong side of a pair of cybernetic swords, Turk didn’t panic. Instead, he dodged Vanilla’s first swing, then blocked the next. Vanilla had no intention of stopping there, though, because he let out a wordless battle cry before redoubling his efforts. Metal blades clashed with Turk’s free arm, which turned out to be cybernetic as well, albeit with a thin coating of Realskin.
Not to be left out, Pegleg climbed to his feet and backed away, his arm-gun aimed at Turk. I heard him mumble something along the lines of, “Ought not hit people no more…”
Then, he fired. In the narrow confines of the alley, it was like a cannon had gone off. The puddles of liquid erupted, spraying into the air, and the sound rattled the fire escapes dangling above us. Windows shattered, raining glass down into the alley, and, most importantly, a ball of molten metal tore across the alley to slam into Turk.
The impact sent me flying in one direction while Turk went in the other. Notably, he took a good portion of my hair with him. I didn’t have any time to curse him, though, because a millisecond later, I found myself slamming into a concrete wall. My breath left my chest, and I thought I felt at least a couple of ribs crack before I fell to the ground, landing in a pile of garbage. Hopefully, nobody had left any used needles lying about.
Over the next few seconds, I lay there, my thoughts slow and muddled. In retrospect, I’d hit my head pretty damned hard, and I had a not-so-light concussion. But in the moment, I was in no shape to properly assess the damage. In any case, I had more important things to worry about.
No – not the trio of idiots who’d forgotten I even existed. Both Pegleg and Vanilla – who wasn’t so Vanilla, now that I thought about it – were engaged in a pretty impressive brawl. Every now and then, Pegleg would shoot Turk again, but he’d clearly spent most of his Mist on that first shot. And given that it had torn a hole right through Turk’s midsection, it was a fairly impressive attack. Not that it did much good, of course. Despite having had his insides splattered across a wall, Turk was as functional as ever. And more importantly, Pegleg had thoroughly pissed him off.
I knew how that fight was going to end, and it probably wouldn’t be much longer until Turk had the others subdued. Or dead. Probably dead. So, I focused on the only thing that really mattered – my ill-gotten gains. Luckily, the package hadn’t been damaged, and I dared to hope its contents would be similarly unaffected.
Seeing that I had a chance to escape – after all, Turk was way more focused on establishing dominance to care about little ol’ me – I scrambled to my feet. Or staggered. Definitely staggered. Whatever the case, I grabbed the package and ran from the alley-turned-warzone. And into the flow of pedestrians.
The street itself was mostly empty, but that wasn’t so surprising. Not many people in the Garden District could afford any more transportation than their own two feet, so only a few cars or bikes, both variants hovering on what looked like cushions of air, passed by. One day, I would get my own bike. I already had the perfect one picked out, too. But I had to wait until after I got my implant, at least. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have the skill to control it. That was for another day, though. For now, I needed to focus on escape.
At first, I moved with unhurried purpose, trying to seem like just another pedestrian. Sure, I was coated in foul smelling muck, had bits of trash clinging to my jeans, and blood trickling down my forehead, but that wasn’t so uncommon. Even the fight between Turk and the other two mooks hadn’t really drawn any attention, despite it destroying windows and rattling the ground. Most of the city’s natives had seen much worse, and they all knew to stay in their own lane; otherwise, they might end up on the wrong end of something like Pegleg’s arm-cannon. And most people couldn’t just shrug something like that off.
Turk was Tier-3, and he’d clearly trained quite a bit. He probably hadn’t reached his limits, but few people ever did. My uncle, for instance, was a positively ancient Tier-5, and he probably had the stats to prove it. Or that’s what I’d heard. Without an implant, I didn’t have access to any skills or optics, so I couldn’t be sure. For his part, Uncle Jeremiah didn’t like to talk about things like that. No matter how many times I asked.
After a few minutes of weaving through the crowd of pedestrians, I veered off into another alley. I didn’t stop there, though. Instead, I took off at a jog, turning this way and that through the maze of backstreets that ran through the massive, concrete buildings. Every now and then, I would pass a bum or a drug addict – probably glitter-fiends or dustheads, though my uncle had kept me away from those sorts, so I couldn’t be sure what their drug of choice was – but I ignored them all. So it went for a little more than an hour until, finally, I reached familiar territory.
I reached the head of an alley and looked back and forth before crossing the broad street. It was the edge of the Garden, so there were more cars and bikes aplenty – all with angular designs and going almost too fast to track with the naked eye. Again, I had to rip my thoughts away from the bike I planned to get the moment I turned sixteen, got my implant, and saved up enough money. I didn’t think Turk or his mooks, if they had survived the infighting, would still be on my tail, but they weren’t the only people to worry about. Nova City was full of dangers, especially for those of us who hadn’t gotten our implants.
But that would change soon for me. I was only a few days away from turning sixteen, which meant I could report to the public Confluence and get an implant. It wouldn’t be top-of-the-line, but anything was better than nothing. Besides, maybe I’d get lucky and make it into one of the specialty programs. Or perhaps I could even become a Templar.
I almost chuckled at the thought. Me? A Templar? No chance, there.
After waiting for an opening, I darted across the street and into another alley on the other side. Back on my home turf, I didn’t even have to think as I traversed the twisting turns. The buildings here were a little smaller, but they were constructed of the same sturdy concrete as the rest of the city. Sure, in places like King’s Row, the concrete was usually decorated with fanciful facades, but those weren’t for the likes of me to even look upon. I’d only been in that vaunted district a single time, but even that small taste was enough to tell me that I didn’t belong.
“Fancy assholes,” I muttered, eyeing a nearby drainage grate. I crossed the alley and, with a heave, levered it out of the way. Then, I climbed inside before pulling it back into place behind me. My ribs twinged at the motion, but it wasn’t too bad. Perhaps I’d avoided breaking anything after all. I dropped down into the tunnel; it didn’t smell great, but it was still better than whatever I’d fallen into earlier. Or maybe I was just used to it, by now.
My feet splashed in the shallow stream of water at the bottom of the tunnel as I walked the familiar path back to my home-away-from-home. Ever since I’d run away a month before, I’d been living beneath the city, and it had begun to feel more and more comfortable with every passing day. Sure, it wasn’t luxurious, and it was a pain in the ass to get to, but that wasn’t so bad – especially considering the alternative.
It took me about half an hour to reach my destination, and when I did, I relaxed at the familiar sight. At one point, it had been a cistern, but for whatever reason, it had been bypassed, resulting in a dry room. It wasn’t much to look at, either. Just an old, discarded couch, a few boxes, and a nano-generator I’d found on one of my treasure hunts. But with power, somewhere to sleep, and blessed solitude, it was enough.
Of course, the moment I stepped into my humble abode, I knew that I’d lost one of those things. I wasn’t alone. Worse, I knew precisely who’d found me.
I glanced into the corner, saying, “Hey, Uncle Jeremiah. Long time, no see.”
I couldn’t see him, but I still knew he was there. Call it intuition. Or maybe there was some subtle shift in the air, a smell, or a sound I’d subconsciously catalogued. I have no idea. It was probably just as likely that I was talking to an empty room. But every instinct I had screamed at me that someone was nestled in those shadows. That it was him was just the most logical guess. After all, who else could find me down here? Who else would want to?
A soft chuckle came from the shadows, confirming my suspicions. Then, my uncle – or great-great-uncle, I suppose, but who’s really counting these days? – emerged. He looked no older than fifty, with a shiny, bald head, full beard, and a build that suggested athleticism. Like me, he had dark skin, full lips, and lively eyes. He wore a black tank-top, loose faux-leather pants, and a coat that dangled down to mid-calf.
“You smell like shit,” he said. “But at least you haven’t forgotten everything I taught you.”
“Nice to see you, too,” I muttered. Then, under my breath, I added, “Asshole.”