They left the building, the guard waving them off happily. They walked by the ink-black water that reflected the city's nightlife. The river separated two sides of the city: a more modern and clean side and one littered with abandoned broken buildings. They were mostly the remains of old factories. When factory jobs began to be outsourced to other planets, many companies left the facility with machinery still inside. Junkies scouted through the dilapidated mechanisms looking for parts to sell. Even now, Fri could hear the sounds of distant scraping and rummaging.
“How have you been, Miss. Teacher?” Xan asked.
“Better?” she answered, unsure of what to say. She couldn’t tell him about Ryuu and her adventures to seven, and she couldn’t tell him about the child. There wasn’t much she could tell the man walking next to her. Was she even allowed to tell him anything?
“Well, I am happy to hear that.” He walked by the edge of the water.
She never liked walking by the edge, always afraid of falling in and drowning in the murky, polluted water. They would never find her body again; it would be left there with hundreds of others buried by waves of time. “How many bodies do you think are hidden in these waters?”
“Too many, in fact, they had installed a cleaner system. A putrid thing that scrapes up remains. It comes by every few weeks to swallow new carcasses and reprocess them.” When he smiled, she could see his dimples. He seemed warm, happy, and sweet in a strange way. It was an odd thing to notice when talking about bodies. How could the boss of a criminal organization be sweet? She wondered. For all she knew, he could have been the reason for so many bodies in the river.
“Did you enjoy my little gift?” he asked.
She looked up at him, unsure of what he was talking about. She was shuffling through memories of the last two weeks, looking for something to give her a hint. There was nothing she could recall. Maybe he had mistaken her with someone else.
He sighed dramatically, which told her he was being sarcastic. " How could you have not noticed? I had my men clean out the apartment, and the streets have been cleaned from the useless waste.”
She had noticed that things seemed cleaner and the air was fresher but was never able to link the change to him. Should she thank him? It would be better to thank him. At the end of the day, their life depended on this man’s wallet.
“Yes, thank you,” Fri mumbled.
He stopped walking, causing her to come to a halt. “Oh, sweety, don’t tell me you didn’t know who I was that night?” He searched her face for an answer, green eyes piercing her soul. And then laughed, a hearty laugh, wiping tears off the corner of his eyes. “That’s wonderful, Miss Teacher. You keep on surprising me. I didn’t know there was someone who still did not know about me,” he said between breathless laughs.
His laugh made her feel warm, and for a moment, the tension of knowing who the man was faded. Heat spread across her face, and she awkwardly coughed, turning away, “What can I say? I’m full of surprises.”
“What brings you here?” Fri asked.
There was a moment of silence between them as Xan collected himself, “just some earthly business,” he paused.
From her peripheral vision, she could see that he was looking at her.
“When are you leaving,” she asked, trying to avoid his gaze. It burned her cheeks, and she tried to look anywhere but at him.
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“Something piqued my interest, so I decided to stay a bit longer,” he replied.
Fri ignored the implications, imagining that the thing that had piqued his interest could not have possibly been her because why else would he be burning holes in the side of her face with that gaze? There were many things and people on level 1. She was the least exciting of them.
“What is the part for?” she tried to steer the conversation in another direction.
“I’m not sure it came from an anonymous buyer off planet. They pay well, and I don’t ask.”
“Why would someone off-world ask for something like that? It looks like it could easily be printed.” It was strange. The only reason would be to avoid a trail linking them to the part, but if so, what was the part used for? She had finally remembered where she had seen it before and what it was. It resembled the spinal fusion used for gambies. If that was what it really was, then it was an easily obtainable item, not something you would need to buy on the black market or even on earth, for that matter.
“You’d be surprised how much some people have to hide.”
They walked for a while, making small talk, until they got to the outskirts of the center, where the noise died down a bit. She noticed it before he did: a black van that was too nice, too new, and too pristine to belong on level 1.
She pointed at it, “Do you see that? Doesn’t it look out of place?’
He glanced at it, “It isn’t the strangest thing I’ve seen here,” and kept walking.
However, she stopped and watched as the door slid open and a body was shoved out. The van sped away seconds later. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. This was not normal. The body did not look like that of a sex worker. It looked almost zombified from where she stood. “They just threw a body out,” she mumbled.
He stopped and looked over at where the mass lay in the middle of the road, “Seems to be so.”
“We need to check it out,” she said, not waiting for him. Instead, she made her way towards the corpse. He followed her; it was not like he had a choice.
It was a deathly, skinny man whose bones poked out from ghastly skin. He had been thrown face down, revealing a hole at the base of his neck. She wanted to throw up, but she took a deep breath. This was just a dead body, she reminded herself.
Xan pulled out a pair of gloved and put them on. He leaned down and proceeded to shove a finger into the gaping hole.
She stared at him wide-eyed, trying to process the man's thought process in front of her. Her stomach churned, and she glanced away. Xan was definitely not a normal person. A dead body would faze a normal person. A normal person did not stick fingers into dead bodies. Fri wanted to gag but took a deep breath.
A few moments later, he pulled it out, covered in a clear liquid, and brought it to his face to examine. “It looks like a gambie, and this-” he brought the hand towards her, “ is brain fluid.”
Fri moved away, not wanting to be near the bodily fluids. “I don’t need to see it. I trust you on that,” she mumbled.
Why would someone throw the body of a gambie into the streets? Even if it had died, the cleaners would have disposed of them later. There was no reason to even move a Gambie.
“Well, I think we solved the mystery,” he looked at the secretions on his fingers in disgust.
“No, there’s something strange about him. Can you lift his shirt,” she asked.
Xan sighed. “Your wish is my command,” he lifted the shirt, revealing dozens of scars and holes of different sizes.
A gambie would be connected through a spinal tube to the cyber-web. This allowed them to feel virtual reality. However, there was never any mention of multiple connections, much less incisions in the body. She was far from an expert on the matter, but she did know some things. Other than the spinal connection, which intercepted data to the brain, the whites of their eyes would turn a permanent yellow.
“I don’t think this is a gambie,” she muttered and kneeled down next to the body.
“Help turn him around,” she went to grab the body but was stopped by Xan.
“I’ll do it. I’d rather you not dirty your hands.” He rolled the body over.
The man was skinny, as most gambies were due to muscle deterioration, but not just that he was malnourished. She knew that gambies would connect themselves to feeding tubes since the point wasn’t to die but to live within the cyber realm. However, there was still something off, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. She cleared her throat, “could you open his eyes.”
Xan reached a hand and started to open the man’s eyelids but suddenly stopped.
“There’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” Fri questioned.
“They took his eyes,” Xan replied.